Therapeutic Alliance

Excuse me? Big brother? Who does he think I am? Then I remembered that my appearance was that of a ten-year-old. The only response I could give was a deep sigh, which the kid would certainly interpret as an outlet of my bottomless sorrow. People often start their reasoning from the conclusion, after all.

“What is your name?” I promptly changed the subject.

“Call me big brother!” He said. Yeah… That isn’t happening. I could hear Lyla behind me covering her mouth to stifle her laughter.

“I’m older than I look, so it won’t be right for me to do that.”

The kid shook his head. “Don’t lie to me. I’m even taller than you!” This was why I hated dealing with children.

“Fine. You don’t have to tell me your name, but tell me how you got stuck up there.” I should have focused on getting the information I needed from the start.

There was no reason to know this kid more intimately, especially when his thoughts might end up leaking into my mind again. Only his language abilities were valuable, and that’s it. My telepathy should only be used to get information from enemies. Any more of it, constantly letting others’ thoughts violate my private world, I couldn’t imagine any positive outcomes from that.

The kid leaned away from me, and I could feel the walls between us coming back up, but maybe this was the distance I wanted all along.

“It was an accident. I slipped off the rooftop and fell onto the platform. I told this to the scary man already,” he said. He must be talking about Zeroc. I was surprised he could detect the unsettling aura of the bodyguard. Taking him at face value, his playful tone and light-hearted attitude might give people the wrong idea (when he wasn’t murdering people).

“Where do you normally get your meals?” I asked.

“I got them from the adults.”

“Who? Is it one specific person? Or are they part of an organization? Where do you usually get the food?”

The kid avoided my gaze. Then, steadily, he retreated under the cover. This barrage of questions must have given him the impression that I was interrogating him. It was uncharacteristic of me to commit such a blunder.

I had to calm myself down to take a more logical approach, drawing from objective tips on how to conduct therapy for reference. I remembered that building rapport was one of the crucial steps. Maybe I should start by asking for his age, so I could know which developmental stage he was on, and choose the best strategy to deal with him.

“Sorry. I was too demanding. Can you tell me your age first?” I asked in a soft voice. Easing in with simple questions would let him feel more comfortable.

“I don’t know.” Wait, he didn’t know? Oh, right. He must be an orphan. It must be hard to survive on the streets… I cut off my train of thought before I could further empathize with him. After getting a general idea of how my abilities worked, there was no excuse for me to indulge in unnecessary connections.

A rough estimate of his age should suffice. He appeared to be around twelve, so if I follow Erikson’s psychosocial stages, it would put him close to the stage where identity development was central in his psyche. My best shot at earning his trust was to give him something to build his identity on.

“You don’t have to know. I know you are a good brother. And so, you will tell me where to get food from, because that is what good brothers do.” The kid poked his head out of his den. That was a promising sign that he was receptive to what I said.

“It is big brother.” He whispered.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not a good brother. I’m a good big brother.”

My smile almost faltered, and I mentally recited the long-term psychological harms of child beating. Why was the kid so obsessed with being an elder brother? Maybe I should try re-establishing a psychic connection with him, but the cost would outweigh the benefits. In the first place, my job wasn’t to investigate the cause behind the slow death of this city. Wasting my energy to get information that might not exist at all would be stupid. I should get to sleep.

“If you think so. Well, I should go to sleep now.” I hurried to end the conversation.

“Good night.” The kid reached out towards my head. Before he could ruin my self-image with his touch, I dodged it with a firm motion, treating his hand as a biohazard. Faster than I thought possible, I hurried out of the room and shut the door to ensure that little imp couldn’t chase after me.

Lyla watched me with an annoying grin. “Your big brother’s name is Coyote. He told me.”

I wanted something to knock the smugness out of her, but I couldn’t think of a good comeback. Lack of sleep impairs critical thinking and attention. Maybe I should get to bed even though I wasn’t that sleepy. I was ready to leave after one more remark: “I didn’t know you were good with kids. Hmm… Maybe that wasn’t so surprising.”

She elbowed me playfully. “What do you mean?”

From this point onward, I would need to be more cautious about getting too close to people. Listening in on their thoughts was an undeniable violation of their privacy. And all of their emotional baggage, cognitive blind spots, and altered states of consciousness would become my problem too. Even so, in response to Lyla’s teasing, I couldn’t help but smile a little.

“Nothing,” I said. For the second time, I was prepared to bid her goodnight, but Lyla just had to disrupt my plans again. This girl, how disconnected could she be from the person she was talking to? Could she learn to read social cues? She started speaking again.

“I… I didn’t have a chance to say this before, but I’m happy that you’re safe, Thomas. I just wish I could have made one sale before you returned, so you could be proud of me for once.”

She was so stupid. Could she use her brain for once? Did she think that after a whole day of zero customers, one would suddenly show up at night, risking a journey through the treacherous streets, where what they had bought would likely be snatched away?

Maybe I was being too harsh with her, but thoughts after thoughts clustered in my head into a gang that kept berating her. The simple desire she expressed drew tears out of my eyes. Once a single drop leaked out, more followed, and it wouldn’t stop gushing out. It was like a dam broke, releasing everything I had kept inside at once.

The weight of my emotions sent me kneeling on the floor. My shaking hands latched onto Lyla’s robe, without a spare thought to care if my actions were disrespectful, because the pain had overtaken my body, a pain that sprouted from the bottom of my heart. It squeezed out sentences I wouldn’t imagine myself saying, ones that suited a real ten-year-old.

“That was horrible. I nearly died. It wasn’t just the robbers, but also the shapeshifter and the boar, each time I was so close to death. Why can’t I find a safe place? Why does danger always come to me? Is there something wrong with me? Haven’t I suffered enough? I want to go back…”

Lyla took me into an embrace. She patted my head like Coyote did, but this time it felt warm. The touch conveyed words she didn’t have to say out loud. She understood me, whereas I couldn’t return the favor. Despite the few days spent with Lyla and the life-or-death situation we got through together, I barely knew anything about her. That might be for the best, because individual idiosyncrasies would only slant judgment. Many cognitive biases operate this way.

And there was the shifter, a monster with an unforgettable swan song. It was strange to think about it in personal terms, not as a member of a wider species, but as a separate entity. That shouldn’t be how I address it in my memories, because I should not overlook that creature’s diet composed of human beings, regardless of how much its digestive system and instincts and impulses and genetics played a part in what it chose to prey upon. Looking up at Lyla, the hypotheticals and questions slipped out of my lips.

“Maybe we can leave the shifter without killing it. Could we have done that? It wouldn’t have chased after us; it was a waste of its energy. Maybe we didn’t have to burn it alive. We could have found some way to chop off its head. Could we?”

Lyla didn’t answer me immediately; she took the time to think about it. And I waited for her, silent even in my brain. “There is a saying where I’m from, that the forest can be a cold or passionate place, depending on how we look at it. It is cold if we think about the chilling breeze, the uncompromising trees, the unchanging stream of the river. It is passionate if we think about all the animals, big and small, struggling to survive. So, you can feel bad for the shifter. That doesn’t make you evil. But we are passionate about our lives too. And did what we did in our struggle to survive.”

Her words must have been imbued with magic, because it was like a knot in my mind that I failed to untie vanished at once without a trace. When I first got here, I soothed myself by dismissing this world as an illusion created by my brain, but now, everything seemed so real. And the person before me, she had to have internal experiences too. I didn’t care how faulty this conclusion was, because all that mattered was that I wanted to help her. I wanted to support her.

Wiping the tears from my eyes, I let myself chuckle to communicate to Lyla that I was feeling better. Unexpectedly, what I got back was Lyla’s body shivering. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Nothing. I just didn’t know you could laugh.” Okay, maybe I didn’t want to help her at all. I slipped out of Lyla’s embrace. The hug was getting embarrassing.

“You should do what you came here to do,” I said.

“Huh?”

“There’s no way you traveled all the way here to look after a store that has no customers.”

“Yet. No customers yet.”

“Whatever. You don’t have to tell me. Just promise me you will do it.” I poked at Lyla’s arm. It was meant to be threatening, but because of my body size, it just looked like a child seeking attention. I hate this body.

Lyla burst out laughing. “Sure, I promise.”

“Then, I’ll go to bed. It’s been a long day for me. I can use either of those rooms, right?” There were two other rooms besides the one Coyote was in. Lyla nodded.

My gaze drifted to Coyote’s room. “Actually… before that…” I muttered, and then I slid into the room, keeping the door shut for a private exchange, though the walls for sure weren’t soundproof, judging from Coyote’s expression. He stared at me with curious eyes, obviously having heard something.

I wasn’t about to stay and confide in him, so I hurried to get what I wanted to say out: “You don’t have to trust me, but I trust you, big… Ahem… big brother.”

Dignity and pride became a myth for me that day. I didn’t even know why I said that; no psychological terms could explain it precisely. It just felt right. The blame fell on my intuition, which differed little from gambling, and I hated gambling.

The fallout shame drove me out of the room as if escaping from a phantom. Before I could slam the door, Coyote’s faint reply floated into my ears: “I’m actually a girl. So, call me big sister.”

The awkwardness spurred me to flee before fully processing what she said.