The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

(Transcript from August 7th, 2007 2:00 PM-2:45 session of Dr. Thomasina Certwick and patient Robin Adelstein. Bug appears to still be recording properly and undetected, which means our operative is likewise. Could we get a video transmitter in here? [BH: I’m sure you’d love that, but neither necessary or justified by budget.])

“It’s fine to look at the clock, Robin.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. Another five minutes and I’ll get a paperback from the lobby.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Talk when you’re ready to talk.”

“I’m sorry.”

“At three apologies I think we’re good. Have you been in therapy before?”

“No, this doesn’t look like a normal therapist’s office.”

“How would you know?”

“I guess having seen…”

“Movies and New Yorker cartoons. Especially movies.”

“I don’t remember saying that I was a movie critic.”

“It was on the paper’s insurance forms.”

“Have you read me before?”

”I don’t get the New York Telegram.”

“Which is good, because I don’t write for them. Also they went bankrupt last year. I write for the Manhattan Guardian.”

“I don’t think I know that one.”

“It’s the free one they give you at the subway entrance.”

“Oh, the one with the cover with—”

“No, the other one.”

“Oh.”

“They have surprisingly good health coverage. Apparently even covering 20 sessions of therapy a year. So, Movies and New Yorker cartoons. Isn’t there supposed be a couch that I lie back on. Aren’t you supposed have a notebook? And a beard? And be a man, I guess?”

“The laying on the couch is mostly in Fruedian therapy, and it’s where you just talk and I just listen and you come to epiphanies on your own.”

“Why would I pay you? How would I even know you were back there? Or alive? Oh, now I get that Woody Allen joke.”

“Which one?”

“ It’s uh… ‘My analyst died two years ago, and I never realized it.’”

“That’s a funny joke there.”

“Well, my imitation skills are crap.”

“You seem anxious to impress me, mostly in a performative manner. Do your movie therapists serve tea?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Have a cup of tea.”

“I don’t like tea.”

“You haven’t had this tea. Just take the cup in your hands. Little sip at first. Let it swish around your mouth a bit before swallowing. Just like thatat.”

“You talk about it like it’s scotch. Christ, it tastes almost as bad as scotch.”

“So, at some point, you’re going to tell me why you’re here. Or you can go back to the clock and wait until you get to smoke another joint to go with the one you had to smoke to get up the courage to get yourself here.”

“So what if I smoke? Half of the city smokes. I heard the mayor smokes.”

“Yeah, but the mayor doesn’t smoke like you smoke. You’re functioning completely lucidly and your eyes are barely red, which tells me you’re used to being high on a regular basis and fooling most of the people around you. Or thinking you are. You have a high tolerance, and would probably take, let’s see you’re 115 lbs…I’d say about 4 bowls to get you ‘high’ high. As opposed to the level of high that you currently need to just make it through any stress. I’m guessing you know a delivery service that provides the good stuff. So, we’ll round up to a hundred bucks a week. If you weren’t smoking, you could actually afford a decent psychiatrist.”

“True.”

“I can do parlor tricks all day or you can tell me why you’re here.”

“Two weeks ago I almost killed a man.”

“With a chainsaw?”

“With indifference. I was the only one who saw him choking.”

“Who was he?”

“Marvin Daltry. Marv to well… nobody, though he tried to get us to call him that for a week. He’s first-string for Wednesday. He’s a prick. Or has been since the divorce. And the dot com bust. At screenings, when there’s a sex scene, I can hear him clucking in disapproval from two rows away. He’s started wearing an ascot and once I saw him steal half the tip once when we were all out for dinner. “

“These aren’t capital offenses.”

“And he’s not dead.”

“What else did he do?”

“He spent 6,000 words insulting a woman who, professionally speaking, raised him from a pup. Taught him to think for himself. Stayed up until 2 AM putting green ink all over his rough drafts. Drumming the rhythm of a sentence into his little peanut-shaped head. But it hurt. He once told me she was the only one who could make him feel like an asshole. Which is a service that still dearly needs to be applied. But she’s conveniently two years dead, and so he can write about she tried to play Svengali with all of us, how she was a self-contradictory ideologue who talked during movies, and liked to interfere…”

“If she talked during movies, she deserved what she got.”

“Normally, I’d agree, but go fuck yourself.”

“She didn’t just raise him from a pup?”

“I, I wrote her a fan letter, the only fan letter I sent anyone, when I was 14. I sent along two reviews from my junior high school paper. I got back a very sweet hand-written note, but she ripped them apart. Told me to stop with the easy cynicism and the cheap insults. Said I was trying to copy her and was failing badly. Next to where I wrote that the score to Batman Returns was “cod-Wagnerian,” she put in big letters, ‘Do not write about Wagner until you have actually listened to Wagner.’ I spent my next month’s allowance on CDs of the Ring Cycle. To be honest, I still can’t stand him, but I actually know a little bit of what I’m talking about now.

“And I kept writing. And she tore some things apart and praised others, and gossiped about movie stars, directors, and told me to read a bunch of books my teachers hadn’t heard of and to see a bunch of things that weren’t on VHS, and so once I let Richie Tills feel me up so he’d go with me to a Bertolucci because the revival house was in a bad neighborhood. She obviously felt bad when I wrote her about that, and called me up to say that I should take whatever she said with a big pile of salt, and to form my opinions. And then putting in a good word, without ever having met me in person, that got me internship after my freshman year in college.”

“Ok. So then you decided to kill Marv.”

“I didn’t decide. I was at the food court and I was heading to the restroom to see if I could get the light caesar dressing off my t-shirt and he was sitting against the wall turning purple and pointing to his throat. I’d run into him earlier when we were both wolfing down some horrible mush of a chicken sandwich so we could get to the theater on time, and apparently he’d wolfed too fast. I don’t know why he’d pulled himself off against the wall rather than going to the other tables, but I was the only one who could noticed him. And I hesitated.

“I thought, we’re just going to go upstairs and sit among a bunch of radio contest winners and fanboys with neon websites in a crowded room and watch a bunch of dolls, I’m sorry ‘action figures,’ take dumps in each others mouths for 90 minutes or whatever—it’s not clear with the editing— and write about it for a bunch of people who don’t care anyway and then go to another theater and do it again, and then await the silence of grave. I’m sorry, a smallish buyout from our respective publications, then a stint at trying to make blogging pay, and then the silence of the grave.”

“So it would be a mercy killing for him.”

“No, I still hated him. I’d go to jail and I’d probably have enough of a hook that my completely non-crazy manifesto would be a best seller.”

“How long did you hesitate for?”

“30 seconds.”

“You know, with the all pot, you have no idea how much the actual time was. Without looking at the clock, tell me how long this session has been.”

“Shit!”

“I said without looking at the clock.”

“Ok, so write up some prescriptions before you have to see the next schlub. I know I don’t need it per se, but if you could put some adderall in with the anti-depressants, I’d be grateful.”

“All you’re getting now is another cup of tea.”

“I drank my tea? I drank my tea.”

“Did you like it?”

“Not at first. There’s an aftertaste. But then I got used it.”

“Well, drink it all. Sometimes the Prozac sticks to the bottom of the cup. And we still have a few minutes.”

“That’s a pretty teapot.”

“So I gather you didn’t kill him?”

“I gave him the Heimlich. His whole body smelled of sardines. And I could see it in his eyes. He knew I waited.”

“You know, you wouldn’t actually go to prison for not giving him the Heimlich. They don’t have Good Samaritan laws in this country.”

“Because no one would think not to help a fellow human being choking to death.”

“I’m going to state the obvious. Your problems, they started long before the food court incident.”

“I don’t want to whine about my job, because I know a hundred other people would gladly take it. I know there’s a guy a half mile away whose pouring gravel to make a highway and his skin just prickled a bit at the thought of me complaining of a career of sitting down in a warm comfortable theater and watching movies all day. But I know where things are headed and I can’t pour concrete. Hell, I can barely type at a decent speed, and scrambling for freelance just sucks, and even if the job were here, the fuck does it matter? I’m in the same sand trap as last week, except I’m sinking a little further. Which I guess makes it quicksand rather than a sand trap, except it’s not quicksand, it’s like mayonnaise and it’s so fucking freeing to be able to mix my metaphors here— is that what people mean when they say this a ‘safe space’? I’m babbling.”

“Take another sip of tea. Breathe. Why are do feel your situation is stagnant?”

“I wake up every morning and I’m happy for five minutes until I remember I used to want this job, used to believe everything Oscar Wilde said about criticism art in and of itself, wanted to start people thinking, like she made me think. On another note, my most intimate relationship is with a stalker directing a Lord of The Rings knock-off in Bulgaria.”

“Ok, we’ll get to him later. It’s not a sprint.”

“I have to show him this doesn’t bother me. I have to show him that I am not intimidated. I haveta keep talking to him! Oh God, your rug. Let me get some paper towels.”

“It’s stain-resistant, Robin. Don’t bother to stand up. Just relax and breathe in. Now breathe out.”

“Didn’t like it at first, but this…this is really good tea. What’s the brand?”

“It’s imported, you can’t get here.”

“I can still feel it coating my throat.”

“That’s good.”

“But, doctor?”

“Yes?”

“I feel woozy. I feel drunk. Not drunk, but drunkish. Drunkishy. Heh.”

“Relaxed.”

“Relaxed. Heh”

“Relaxed. You need to relax.”

“I need to relax.“

“I want you to just listen to my voice for a little while and let it carry you. You don’t have to talk.”

“Wait, I can’t relax. If I’m this relaxed at the screening, gonna be snoring when the lights go down.”

“You don’t need to worry about that now.”

“I don’t?”

“You don’t. Just take another breath in and feel the chair against your body.”

“The chair is nice.”

“You may find that as you lay back, the chair feels softer and softer and envelops you more and more.”

“Yeah.”

“And there’s this odd side effect to the tea that as it coats your throat, it relaxes it further and further, so as you try to talk, you find it just too much effort to bother, just so relaxing. So you can just nod ‘yes’ or shake your head ‘no’ when I ask you something. And answering me make you feel deeper and warmer and more relaxed. Ok? Good. And you like this, don’t you? You like the way I make you feel. So you’re going to want to come back here, because only I can make you feel this way. And you’re right, I don’t have time to do much now, but that’s ok because this feels so good and so warm.

“So I want to just think about the personal electronics that you own. And if you have an iPod, just nod. That’s good. Do you have it with you? Ok, that’s fine. You may find, however, that you want to carry your iPod with you, particularly when you go to your next appointment. Music is good, right? Yes. Now, do you find yourself feeling a little more dazed and a little more restful the more you lie in the chair? Do you feel that warmth spreading out throughout your body, make you tingle a little bit all around? Good. And do you find that every time I say ‘good,’ you feel a little deeper, a little tinglier? That’s right. So, you’d want to continue feeling this way. So, when you wake up in a few minutes after the tea flows through your system, you’ll want to tell me all about your friend Wendy Hedges at the financial desk. “