A SESSION WITH DR. CUSHING

It is, isn’t it. Unconventional.

I’m happy too. Really happy you trust me enough to let me to bring you up here, Doctor Cushing. And so early in the morning, too. I mean, unless this is just something you just secretly do as… as just, you know, like a standard part of the service, like ”Trauma Never Sleeps, so Why Should Doctor Theodora Cushing: Neurosis Neutraliser of the Night”… Doctor, have you ever given any other client a session at four a.m. before?

Well, just, thank you. For being so willing. To… you know… to do this for me.

I know, Doctor, and it’s been such an unbelievable blessing for me that you do have that attitude towards your patients. I felt that before the… you know… before… the growth, and I’m even more thankful for it now. Your psychotherapeutic perseverance, your innate willingness and drive to fix people’s brains, no matter what it might take, how long you might have to spend hacking away through the thick, throttling jungles of the human mind until you’ve finally found the cranial crevasse where the psycho-emotional torment has concealed itself, and put it to the sword. Told it to ”Scram! Stop torturing poor Ms Archer or I’ll spill your guts all over her medulla oblongata!”

Honestly, I actually do worry about you sometimes. About how intense a toll it must take on your own body and soul to be this dedicated to resolving the mental anguish of others. Particularly tonight. Given where we are right now. Given the ordeal I’ve just put you through to get us both up here.

I know it’s not, but… For once… You always say that so much of what we do together in our sessions is overcomingwork. Overcoming my unwillingness to assert myself, my own needs, my own deepest desires and dreams and ambitions independent of the demands of a family and a world full of conservative patriarchs. Overcoming my compulsion to just keep my head down and let them keep walking all over me, scraping their shit-stained boots on my spine and leaving me with psychological scoliosis. Overcoming my fears of being… of being perceived: being seen, being heard, of being just… an observable, physical being who occupies spatial dimensions; of being me; of being visible, of grabbing the world by the goddamn throat for once in my timid, terror-stricken life and screaming ”Now, you just listen to me — I am not gonna hide myself away anymore. I’m not going to let you bend me to your will like I’m made of silly putty. I am Nancy Goddamn Archer and I am here and I am proud and I am gonna take up every single motherfucking inch of space that’s coming to me!”

Because I’m not ready.

I know it’s ironic, Doc. Saying you’re gonna scream something from the rooftops then whispering it like a whimpering little kid. But… I mean, it’s not as if it didn’t take us both enough work to get to this stage. Overcoming work. Lots and lots of overcoming work. And like I was saying, I feel like… like I’m not alone in having to do a bit of overcoming for once, Doctor.

I’m not surprised. I mean I guess I probably would be too. I mean I know it must be such a… vulnerable position to be in, a vulnerable thing to let someone do to you. I mean… I just carried you, wrapped in the palm of one hand like you were no more than a Barbie doll, a thousand odd feet up a skyscraper, Doctor Cushing. Like I was King Kong and you were Fay Wray…

Really?

Well… that’s such a… a relief. I was terrified. The entire time. I couldn’t carry you in too loose a grip, otherwise you’d slip out of my hands and fall to your death and I feel like I would die too if I were responsible for the death of anyone, let alone you, Doctor Cushing. But if I held you too tight, I feared I’d crush you. Asphyxiate you. Shatter your ribs, burst your guts, pop your tiny heart, leave you writhing in agony and straining for one last breath beneath my vice-like fingers. I don’t know how you just, instinctively, knew I wasn’t gonna hurt you. That you were gonna be safe. That I was gonna be able to get you to the top of this building safe and sound and we were gonna sit up here, a thousand feet above the mortal world, heads in the clouds, and do therapy like… like normal. Just on top of a skyscraper. At four a.m..

Seriously? That’s actually funny. No, I would never have… You mean, the ones the build those indoor kids play places out of to stop the kids killing themselves when they get a bit too hyperactive and forget how fragile their bodies really are… Those kind of soft play mats?

Soft? Cushiony?

I mean, when I feel my fingers, all I can feel is the bone. Barely any fat flesh there. But I guess maybe there are things about your body that might feel completely different to someone barely six inches tall. Because that’s basically the sort of size you are to me now.

Sometimes I feel as though I might be better off if I were violent. It might have backfired on me back then, back when I was a normal woman…

You know what I mean, Doc. Normal-sized. I mean, you can say a great many statistically uncommon human traits are normal. Being gay is normal. Being autistic is normal. Having dyslexia or OCD is normal. Being fifty feet tall is notnormal, Doctor Cushing. It’s a struggle for me to even think of myself as human anymore, to think that the growth hasn’t well and truly pushed me out the uncanny valley where, like, people may have thought I was a bit different and looked at me a bit weird, or ignored me outright in favour of a less intangibly offputting soul, or chose to look down on me or infantilise me because they didn’t think I was capable of understanding the nuances of human interaction which, in many ways, they’re right, I’m not… and sent me tumbling down the decline into full-on monsterhood. The only thing reminding me that I am still the same human woman I always was is that… well… my body might have changed some since we first started seeing each other… but…

What I’m trying to say, Doctor, is that just because I’m a very different person physically to the way I was when you took me on as a client — very, very different — doesn’t mean I’ve changed who I am on the inside. I’m still, like, Little Miss Nancy deep down. Anxious… a wreck of bottled-up emotions searing through flume-sized veins, frying, frazzling nerves thick as Grid cables with this ceaseless charge, charge, charge of electricity enough to burn a bull elephant to a cinder, blow a blue whale to smithereens, set every tiny little building in this million dollhouse metropolis alight with a snap of the fingers and a bolt from the blue. I am well aware, Doctor, that outwardly my body would be an absolute vessel of abject terror to the denizens of Tiny Town, buzzing like hummingbirds and bees about the city streets. I… there’s no easy way, no sympathetic, humanising way of saying it, I am a Monster, Harbinger of Havoc, Fear and Frenzy, liberated from the cellulite slivers of an old B-movie, a Universal Monster flick, a Hammer horror decaying on the reel of an old abandoned picture house, ready to wreak havoc in the flesh sure, but only in the flesh: deep down inside, I’m nothing of the sort. I am conscious of the power my body now holds and because of that I’m even less inclined to use it than I was when I was just an ordinary woman and had a fraction of it. And if I were to take a shot in the dark, you were able to trust me to carefully pluck you up and softly, softly cradle you up the tallest building in town so we could talk out in the open, in my favourite place in the whole wide world because you knew that, Doctor. You knew I wouldn’t hurt you because I couldn’t hurt you, couldn’t hurt anyone whether I were five feet tall or fifty.

Yeah. You wouldn’t believe it, would you. That there’s a woman bigger than most houses roaming the streets of one of the world’s great cities, yet no-one even knows she exists. She’s completely invisible, inaudible, imperceptible, as anonymous as any city dweller could ever ask to be, and you gotta ask yourself: how the hell is that even possible? Wouldn’t her footsteps thump and cause tremors like the T-Rex in Jurassic Park? Wouldn’t you hear the crunching metal of cars crushed underfoot as she sauntered down the street? Wouldn’t you see her eyes, her scarlet lips sailing above the rooftops, see the blood-soaked seismic cracks and craters in the asphalt trailing in her wake?

I’ve spent my whole life a sylph, a spectre, an immaterial wisp on the wind, forever looking round corners for fear someone might see me, forever treading on tiptoes so sharply en pointe that I feared one day my feet would buckle, collapse in on themselves and disintegrate to powder and pulp, because I couldn’t bear the thought of getting in anyone’s way. I’ve spent my whole life crafting infallible concealment techniques for myself and they’re still serving me well enough that I can live anonymously even after all that’s happened to me. Only go out in the deepest depths of night, when there’s nobody about but drunk stragglers who won’t believe their eyes anyway. Stick to the side streets. Perform your agonising Arabesques so no-one in the terraces and townhouses will stir and see you passing by. And no matter how much it tempts you, don’t peer through the last few dim-lit third-floor windows at lovers whiling away the wee small hours in each other’s arms, vinyl on the record player, film on the TV, tongues and fingers wandering, hearts soaring, because you don’t understand love, you’ve never understood love, or friendship, or just human connection in general, and…

Maybe someday I’ll believe you, Doctor. But not today.

I guess that’s why I come up here, Doc. Every night, four a.m.. Sat silent and still, so if anyone sees me, they’ll think I’m just some giant art installation, a huge piece of inanimate plastic moulded into the shape of a girl, instead of the monster I am. I could never understand the human world in microcosm, viewing tiny fragments of it from within itself; could never understand why people acted the peculiar way they did: how and why they’d form their little tribes and cliques; how and why romantic feelings spark, friendships blossom; how unbreakable bonds get forged then get severed after all in fits of rage and passion. What it is that keeps people going out to work every day and self-actualising every night: throwing parties, keeping fit, making art, exploring the world, not feeling so overwhelmed by the need to keep up appearances or, once you’ve given up on that, to keep your head down and flee the battering currents of society and life… But when you’re up here, a thousand feet and fifty more ascendant above the human realm, and you can see the whole, entire city stretching out before you, well you realise that everything makes more sense when you can see the whole picture. The macrocosm. All those people in all those flats and houses, all those twinkling sulphur lights slowly swimming along highways and drifting down subway tracks, they’re just, like… metropolitan haemocytes, blood cells ebbing and flowing from the heart to the peripheries in perfectly predictable patterns, keeping this great concrete organism thriving. It’s sleeping now — see those gentle trickles of trucks down the western freeways, drizzling through the inky seas of night, threading between archipelagoes of ox-blood brick, that’s all it needs at the moment, to get it through the night. But in a couple hours time, it’ll start to wake up. Stir. Purr into life. Slowly but surely, from the aether of dawn, rings of light will effervesce into being in the suburbs. Bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, cars. Aurora Metropolis ascending to the sky to drown out the stars and coronate the breaking dawn in liquid gold. Time will pass and the lights and the people and the lifeblood of the town will stream towards its core as cars and trains and taxis start springing into motion, drawn by an indefatigable gravity towards the swelling white star at the heart of the city: to work, to play, to congregate, connect the nodes of knowledge, creativity and emotion with such a magnificent fervour that they’ll make this great, white, Earth-bound star beneath us shine bright enough to blind the Sun.

Stop it, Doctor. You know that’s not true. You know I don’t.

Fear usually has me fleeing at the first sign of light in the suburbs. So no-one sees me. But even if you have to go, Doctor Cushing, share a session with a not fifty-foot tall patient somewhere that’s not a thousand feet up at four in the morning, today I’m gonna stay. Be up here all day, silent and still. Watching the city below. Making sense of the world for the first time in my life.

Thank you, Doctor Cushing. Thank you.