II.

“I’m happy that you’ve come early for once, Rosalyne, but I'm having a hard time following what you’re saying.”

“What’s so hard to understand?” I asked.

“Everything, as a matter of fact. You’re fortunate my earlier client left early. They wouldn’t appreciate you barging in the way that you did.”

“You’re always trying to get me to show progress, Mr. Caraway.”

“I’m sorry,” he sighed, “but you’ll have to explain your so-called ‘progress’ to me again.”

When I rushed to Mr. Caraway’s study later that afternoon, the first thing I did was stare into his face, a gesture that I had not attempted since the first time he asked me about my affliction.

As I suspected, there was nothing there.

Some people depicted facelessness with scribbles or oval shapes printed with Japanese kanji. These were interesting symbolically, but they didn’t do enough to describe my own circumstances.

When I stared at Mr. Caraway, his face had been carved out of his head. What I saw was a concave crater patched over with skin. Biologically, this was impossible, unless every other human had evolved to allow for an advanced form of trepanation, where the drill (or perhaps a crescent shaped scythe) removed not just holes but entire splotches of skull. Even then, how did these new humans breathe, eat, and speak? Had they become photosynthetic and spoke through hidden wavelengths, as the Electromagnetic Man had claimed?

No, I suspected not.

These were my own limitations that preconfigured the world.

Mr. Caraway held his hand up to signal a break. He had to do this because there were no facial expressions for me to read. It wasn’t so bad. I had learned instead the microquakes of kneecaps, the twist of the gut, the forward and backwards momentum of the scapula as one oscillated between withdrawn and confident.

Mr. Caraway stood upright and walked to the counter. The wrinkles on his hands suggested someone a bit older, maybe late fifties given the degree of fat atrophy around the interdigital spaces, but he moved deftly with no missed step or stutter. His grip on the teapot was firm, and his fingers tapped off one by one on the ceramic cup as he distributed between each of his digits the task of carrying a hot cup of tea on his way back to his couch.

“You were saying?” he said, sitting down now.

“I saw someone’s face, Mr. Caraway,” I explained for the second time. “Well, not her whole face, but a part of it.”

“You're referring to your special condition,” Mr. Caraway replied. “Fine. Is that why you were looking at me earlier?”

“Yes. You're the same crater as always though, but her face. Her face. It was real. I'm sure of it. It was hard to see, I guess, but she had this big black eye.”

“She had black pupils, you mean?”

“Yes, but everywhere else around her eye too.”

“Hmm.”

Mr. Caraway’s hand moved to his face and vanished.

“I also decided to not lose my temper at these other two people while I was studying in the library,” I continued. “I dropped it, just as you said Mr. Caraway.”

“That's good, but hold on. I'd like to hear more about this other girl. Did you see anything else aside from her one eye?”

“No. She had a lot of hair that got in the way. I don't even know if she has the other eye.”

“Let’s hope that she does,” Mr. Caraway murmured. “Maybe… is this what they call love at first sight? Did you talk to her at all?”

“No, she had a chat with the professor then left immediately after.”

“This is Professor Medea?”

“Yeah. You know her, right?”

“A long time ago, yes. We haven’t spoken… in a long time.”

“Anyway, like I was saying, that's a lot of progress, right Mr. Caraway?”

“I’m glad you’ve had a breakthrough, Rosalyne,” Mr. Caraway answered. “I can't be sure of what this means exactly. Maybe it means your subjective unconsciousness felt a connection to this person, which allowed you to ‘see’ her more clearly in your world, so to speak. If you’re curious, maybe you should introduce yourself to this person. It could help you. Help us.”

“So does this mean-”

“You and I both know what progress in this case refers to, Rosalyne,” Mr. Caraway said. “Your discrete goals here with me aren’t fungible. If this is progress like you say it is, then are you telling me you're ready to talk about what happened?”

“What happened? I already told you about what happened.”

Ripples drifted within the ceramic cup stationed just below Mr. Caraway’s neck.

“Forget it. I didn’t say anything. You’re not ready.”

“No,” I shook my head. “I’m confused. You asked me to talk about what happened. I came here and talked about just that. Is there something else that happened that we need to talk about? Oh! Did I forget to mention the girl with the denim shorts who bumped into me at the stairs to Room 1999-7?”

“You didn’t mention them, no.”

“Well, now I have, but you still sound dissatisfied, Mr. Caraway, which must mean this isn’t the happenings that you’re looking for, which means we have different definitions of ‘what happened.’ But that’s the problem isn’t it? If neither of us speak the right words to each other, then our understandings of what happened exist orthogonally to one another.”

“It’s not that complicated, Rosalyne. I’m talking about what happened with your brother.”

I paused.

Brother.

That’s right.

I once had a brother.

I smashed his sand castles on the beach when I was seven. I was mean to him that time and many times afterwards. We watched a show together once, and I skipped ahead and spoiled the entire thing. I’ll never forget his face after I told him who the real villain was. He let it go because he was the older one, the more responsible one who took on all the pressure from mom and dad no matter the circumstances.

He was an unbreakable, unflappable brother, like a taut rope wound with a sailor’s knot around a metal ceiling fan, spinning and spinning, circumnavigating the world on the day I entered his room to tell him to turn off the radio. His window was open to prevent more black mold, but the neighbors might have complained about the noise.

“Oh. Is that what this is about? I can talk about him,” I shrugged. “I know it’s not my fault what happened. My parents should be the ones here. They drove him to do what he did.”

“They drove him to do all those things?”

“No. Just the one thing. Did they not tell you that when they paid your massive fees? I guess of course they wouldn’t.”

“Not that this is relevant, but I’d say my fees are a fair price over paying for your philosophy degree completely out of pocket.”

“My parents come from old money,” I shrugged, “and I mean old money, like finding several seventeenth century bullion coins just lying around kind of old. And because that’s all they have, that becomes their world, their language of exchange. They didn’t even research you. They just saw that you were priced higher than anyone else.”

“Lucky me.”

“So the least they could do is pay for my school.”

“Tell me a little more about that. We’ve gone over this before, but why philosophy? If you wanted to punish your parents by making them spend more, you could have attempted a more expensive program.”

“... If I tell you the reason, promise not to laugh,” I demanded.

“In a way, I’m contractually obligated not to.”

“My brother wanted to be a philosopher, if you could believe it.”

“...I can.”

“He really admired this one media theorist who wrote about different modes of exchange, the radio for example, and their cultural impacts. He wanted to be someone like that.”

“I see.”

“Even though I don’t blame myself for what happened,” I said, “I think part of me is trying to atone by living in his place. You’ve known people like that, Mr. Caraway, right?”

“I have, yes.”

“So is this considered progress? Am I doing better?”

Mr. Caraway set his tea to the wooden stand next to the couch. A stack of files was stuffed into several manilla folders there, along with a fedora, a half burnt cigar, and a trio of detective novels and a newspaper flipped to the obituary. The old man’s hand slipped into his face, after which he unveiled a pair of sunglasses and set them next to his tea.

“I’m sorry, Rosalyne, but there’s still more that I don’t think you’re telling me. Many of these things we've talked about already in our other sessions. There’s still more information that you’re withholding, isn’t there?”

Tears sprung to my eyes. I shook my head with violent discontent, jolting my jaws left and right as if possessed by a fluctuating current.

“That’s not fair,” I cried. “What, you wanted to hear more details? About things I saw that day? Did you want me to describe things down to the smell? Is that supposed to make me feel better? Get better?”

“Your profile strongly suggests that there’s a great deal of denial–”

“Screw my profile, my brother is dead!” I screamed. “How about you focus less on how he died and how I want to live? What kind of sick world exists where we care more about the dead than the living?”

“Rosalyne!”

I snatched my bag and stormed towards the door. I didn’t wait to hear Mr. Caraway’s plea. I thrust open the door and promptly threw it shut.