Factoring Humanity

Kyle would exhale, then: “You owe my wife a lot, Ms. Gurdjieff. Me, I’d devote the rest of my life to getting you drummed out of your job — but she’s convinced me that that’s not going to be necessary. Your whole profession is going to change wildly, perhaps even collapse, in the next few weeks. But I want you to think about this every day for the rest of your life: think about the fact that my beautiful daughter Mary slit her wrists because of you, and that you then almost destroyed what was left of my family. I want that to haunt you until your dying day.”

He’d look over at Heather, then back at Gurdjieff.

“And that,” he’d say to the woman with great relish as she stood there, her mouth hanging open, “is what we call closure.”

And then he would join his wife, and the two of them would march off together into the night.

That’s what he wanted to do, that’s what he’d intended to do, that’s what he needed to do.

But now, at last, he could not.

It was a fantasy, and, as Heather said to him, in Jungian therapy, fantasy often had to stand in for reality. Dreams were important, and they could help to heal; that one certainly had.

Kyle had entered Becky’s mind — with her permission — and had looked for the “therapy” sessions. He’d wanted to see for himself what had gone wrong, how it had all become so twisted, how his daughters had been turned against him.

He’d had no intention of entering Lydia Gurdjieff’s mind — he’d have rather walked barefoot through a soup of vomit and shit. But, damn it all, just as in its optical-illusion counterpart, the Necker transformation in psychospace was sometimes a matter of will and sometimes a spontaneous occurrence.

Suddenly, he was there, inside Lydia’s mind.

And it was not at all what he’d expected.

It wasn’t dark, dripping evil, corrupt and seething.

Rather, it was every bit as complex and rich and vibrant as Becky’s mind, as Heather’s mind, as Kyle’s own mind.

Lydia Gurdjieff was a person. For the very first time, Kyle actually recognized that she was a human being.

Of course, by an effort of will, he could Necker into any one of the people whose faces were moving through Lydia’s mind — she seemed to be in a grocery store just now, pushing a cart down a wide, crowded aisle. Or he could have simply visualized the solute-and-solvent metaphor and allowed himself to precipitate out, then recrystallize, extracting himself from her.

But he did not. Surprised at what he’d found here, he decided to stay a while.

He’d already seen the “therapy” sessions — he always thought of the word as having quotation marks around it — from Becky’s point of view. It was a simple enough matter to find Lydia’s corresponding perspective.

And suddenly the quotation marks flew away, bats gyrating against the night. It was therapy as far as Lydia was concerned. Becky was so incredibly sad, and she’d already revealed her bulimia. Something was clearly wrong with this child. Lydia could feel her pain — as she’d felt her own pain for so long. Sure, the purging could be related simply to a desire to be thin. Lydia remembered what it was like to be young. The pressure on women, decade after decade, to conform to ridiculous standards of thinness, continued unabated; she remembered her own feelings of inadequacy, standing in front of a full-length mirror in her bathing suit when she’d been Becky’s age. She’d purged, too, thinking that a desire for thinness was the reason, only later learning that eating disorders were commonly associated with sexual abuse.

But — but the symptoms were there in this Becky. Lydia had been through this. Her father had brought her down to his den, night after night, forcing her to touch him, to take him into her mouth, swearing her to secrecy, telling her how it would destroy her mother if she knew Daddy preferred Lydia to her.

If this poor girl — this Becky — had gone through the same thing, then maybe Lydia could help her to at last find some peace, just as Lydia herself had done after she and Daphne had confronted their father. And after all, Becky Graves’s sister Mary, who had thought her grief had only been related to the death of her high-school friend Rachel Cohen, had discovered so much more when she and Lydia really began to look. Surely Becky, the younger sister, had gone through the same thing, just as Daphne, Lydia’s own younger sister, had likewise endured their father’s den.