Patient or Doctor

"You still go there?"

The voice was quiet. She wasn't even sure it had been said out loud.

Shion didn't answer. The silence went on so long she started to wonder if she'd imagined it.

A short while earlier...

It had been raining since the afternoon. Shion had stopped hearing it around eight. Every so often the wind picked up and rattled the window, and that was all.

She was on her last stack of evaluations, initialing the bottom of each page. The water glass at her elbow was half full. Beside the lamp stood a framed photograph, Kazuya laughing in the autumn park with little Shiya on his shoulders, a half-eaten popsicle in her fist.

The brass nameplate, Dr. Shion Kuroki, Senior Clinical Psychotherapist, caught the lamplight whenever she moved.

The clock shows Nine-oh-clock

A knock.

"Come in."

Ishida put his head around the door, clipboard against his chest. "Ma'am, the next patient is running late. I'll send him in when he gets here."

"People have no respect for time." She heard how tired that sounded. "Fine. Ishida-san, call home and tell them I'll be late tonight."

"Of course, Doctor."

She waited for the door to close, rubbed her eyes under her glasses, and went back to the files.

The second knock came a few minutes later. She slid the new folder toward her. "Come in."

The man wore a black T-shirt gone grey at the collar and loose joggers. His bun was coming loose on one side. He was very pale, and it struck her, a beat late, that he wasn't wet. Not his hair, not his shoulders. Not on a night like this.

She let it go. She'd once had a patient arrive in a bathrobe.

"Please, sit."

He sat. He looked at her and kept looking, eyes half shut, in no hurry. He hadn't glanced at the diplomas or the window or anything else in the room. Only her.

She opened the folder. "Mr. Junpei, according to your intake—"

"The Toi."

"Sorry?"

"Call me The Toi."

She smiled the way she did when a patient was being difficult. "Okay. The Toi. Your form says you haven't been sleeping. When did you last sleep properly?"

"One hundred and eighty-five days ago."

"The real number, please."

"One eighty-two point five." He sounded bored. "I rounded up. People like that."

"Nobody stays awake that long. The brain can't."

"A human can't."

Shion pushed her glasses up her nose. Psychotic, probably. Though that wasn't really her call to make. She wrote possible delusional framework and underlined it.

"What's your occupation?"

"I'm a writer."

"Writer of what?"

"Realities."

Her pen stopped.

Nobody answered that way. It wasn't a genre or a job title, and it wasn't a joke either. He'd said it exactly the way he'd said his name.

"Realities," she repeated.

He didn't add anything. He didn't smile or wait to see how she'd take it.

She wrote the word on her pad and left it without underlining.

She went through the routine questions: sleep, work, friends, whether he ever saw or heard things nobody else did. His answers were short and strange, and he never hesitated once.

Around the fourth one she realized he wasn't answering for her benefit. He was just waiting for her to finish.

"You've been trying to work me out since I sat down," he said, propping his cheek on his hand. "You keep reaching for something to call me. Nothing fits, does it?"

Her pen hesitated over the page.

"I'm trying to help."

"You're trying to stay in charge. That's different."

"I'd rather you just answered my questions."

He ignored that.

"When I was seven," he said, "my grandmother had a blue biscuit tin. Dent in the lid. I hid it under the floor of the garden shed."

Shion's pen slowed.

"Whenever something scared me, I whispered it into the tin, shut the lid, and pushed it back into the dark. I called it feeding the tin."

Not mine, she thought. He said I. It's his story.

Her thumb had started to rub the side of the pen. A blue tin. Flowers on the lid, rubbed off at the corners.

"My grandmother knew," he said. "She pretended she didn't. She never moved it."

Nothing showed in his face. He said it flatly, like he was reading out a delivery note.

Lots of kids keep tins, she told herself. Lots of grandmothers look away.

Then the smell came. Wet wood, cold dirt, old nails.

Her stomach lurched, only a little. Her throat had gone dry. She looked down at the pad and counted the ruled lines until it eased.

When she looked up, he was still watching her. His face hadn't moved.

"The dent," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she'd expected. "How'd it get there?"

"The stairs. You dropped it when you ran."

You.

She hadn't said it that way. Or he had, and she'd missed it. She couldn't tell anymore whose tin it was.

Under the desk, her free hand closed.

She had never told her mother. Never told anyone, not even the therapist she'd seen in her twenties. She had barely told herself.

"That's a nice story," she said. "Where did you get it?"

"I didn't get it. I just know it. I know most things." He shrugged. "People call that rude. I call it efficient."

He said it without any show, and somehow that was worse.

The clock ticked. Neither of them said anything.

"You still go there?"

Something crossed his face. She couldn't have said what. It was gone by the time she looked properly.

She went still. "Where?"

He let the pause run until she could hear her own pulse. Then he leaned back, and whatever she'd seen was already gone.

"Nothing."

Shion breathed out slowly through her nose.

He's unwell, she told herself. Sharp and unwell. Cold reading, that's all.

She needed the room back, and she only knew one way to do it. She took a prescription pad out of the drawer and uncapped her pen.

"Given how long you're reporting, I'd like to start you on a short course of a low-dose sedative-hypnotic, with CBT for insomnia. We'll check your thyroid, rule out anything neurological, and review in two weeks. The delusional content could well be secondary to sleep deprivation, in which case—"

"You know what?"

Her pen stopped on the paper.

"I touched your lips."

She looked up. "What?"

"While you were looking at your notes." He said it quite gently. "Your lower lip. It was soft."

She laughed, once. It sounded thin. "That's not possible. I haven't taken my eyes off you."

"Are you sure, Doctor?"

She wasn't.

She touched her lip with the back of her hand. It was cold and damp, and under the cold there was something else, a faint pressure, as if a fingertip had only just lifted.

Her eyes went to the desk.

The glass beside the pad was almost empty. On the rim, a fresh crescent of plum lipstick.

She hadn't moved. She was sure she hadn't moved.

When she looked up, he was watching her face. Really watching, waiting for something.

Then he smiled. It was small, and it was only there because of what he'd seen in her.

He stood without a word and went toward the door. The floor didn't make a sound under him.

"The session isn't over yet."

It was out before she'd decided to say it. Her voice stayed low, mostly even.

He stopped. He didn't look surprised. He smirked, as if he'd been waiting for exactly that.

"For me, it is."

He crossed the room and put his hand on the handle, then looked back. The smirk was gone. His voice was quiet, almost kind, the way you'd warn someone about a loose stair.

"Doctor, books are still written by humans. Don't trust them blindly."

The door shut behind him without a sound.

Shion stayed where she was.

Hands flat on the desk. In for four, out for six, the way she taught her patients. It took a few rounds. The room felt bigger now, and colder.

Her fingers kept shaking. She pressed them into the wood until they stopped.

Her eyes drifted to the photograph. Kazuya laughing. Shiya and her popsicle. Nothing in it had changed, and she held on to that.

A knock.

She jumped. "Come in."

Ishida opened the door, clipboard in hand. “Ma’am—”

"Where were you?" It came out too sharp, and she didn't care. "“A man walked out of this office and you didn't notice him. You didn't stop him. Where were you for the last thirty minutes?”

Ishida blinked. "Sorry, ma'am. Which man?"

"Mr. Junpei. He was just here. He left a second ago."

"Mr. Junpei?" His forehead creased. "He called to cancel earlier. He's not coming tonight."

"That's not possible."

"I took the call myself." He glanced at the empty armchair, then back at her, and his voice went soft, the voice he used on patients. “Ma'am, maybe you're tired.”

She opened her mouth and nothing came.

He sat there. He sat right there.

She looked at the chair. The cushion was flat. Nothing in the air.

Her eyes dropped to the notepad.

She'd been writing, hadn't she? Her pen had been moving the whole time.

There were no notes. The whole page, line after line, in handwriting she barely knew, was one name, down to the bottom edge:

The Toi. The Toi. The Toi.

"Ma'am?" Ishida's voice seemed to come from the other end of a hallway.

Shion lifted her head and looked at the wall.

The clock said nine-oh-five.