Transmission

“Why does it feel like a countdown?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

Kevin shrugged. “I’m not sure. Because the pulses are getting closer together, I guess?”

The psychologist nodded, then went over to her desk. She came back with paper and pencils.

“How are you at art?” she asked. “No, don’t answer that. It doesn’t matter if this is a great work of art or not. I just want you to try to draw what you see, so that I can get a sense of what it’s like. Don’t pay too much attention to it, just draw. Can you do that for me, Kevin?”

Kevin shrugged. “I’ll try.”

He took the pencils and paper, trying to bring the landscape that he’d seen to mind, trying to remember every detail of it. It was hard to do, because although the numbers stayed in his head, it felt as though he had to dive down deep into himself to pull up the images. They were below the surface, and to get at them, Kevin had to pull back into himself, concentrating on nothing else, letting the pencil flow over the paper almost automatically…

 “Okay, Kevin,” she said, taking the pad away before Kevin could get a good look at what he’d drawn. “Let’s see what you’ve…”

He saw the look of shock that crossed her face, so brief that it almost wasn’t there. It was there though, and Kevin had to wonder what it would take to shock someone who heard stories about people dying every day.

“What is it?” Kevin asked. “What did I draw?”

“You don’t know?” Dr. Yalestrom asked.

“I was trying not to think too much,” Kevin said. “Did I do something wrong?”

Dr. Yalestrom shook her head. “No, Kevin, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

She held out Kevin’s drawing. “Would you like to take a look at what you produced? Perhaps it will help you to understand things.”

She held it out folded, in just the tips of her fingers, as if she didn’t want to touch it more than necessary. That made Kevin worry just a little. What could he have drawn that would make an adult react like that? He took it, unfolding it.

A drawing of a spaceship sat there, only “drawing” probably wasn’t the right word for it. This was more like a blueprint, complete in every detail, which seemed impossible in the time Kevin had to draw. He’d never even seen this before, but here it was, on the page, looking giant and flat, like a city perched on a disk. There were smaller disks around it, like worker bees around a queen.

The detail meant that there was something neat, almost clinical, about the way it was drawn, but there was more to it than that. There was something about the geometry of it that was just… wrong, somehow, seeming to have depths and angles to it that shouldn’t have been possible to capture just in a sketch like this.

“But this…” Kevin didn’t know what to say. Didn’t this prove what was happening? Did anyone think he could have just made something like this up?

Apparently, Dr. Yalestrom wasn’t convinced though. She took back the picture, folding it carefully as though she didn’t want to have to look at it. Kevin suspected that the strangeness of it was too much for her.

“I think it’s important that we talk about the things you’re seeing,” she said. “Do you think those things are real?”

Kevin hesitated. “I’m… not sure. They feel real, but a lot of people now have told me that they can’t be.”

“It makes sense,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “What you’re feeling is very common.”

“It is?” What he was experiencing didn’t feel very common at all. “I thought that my illness was rare.”

Dr. Yalestrom moved over to her desk, placing Kevin’s drawing in a file. She picked up a tablet and started to make notes. “Is it important that other people shouldn’t experience what you’re experiencing, Kevin?”

“No, it’s not that,” Kevin said. “It was just that Dr. Markham said that this disease only affects a few people.”

“That’s true,” Dr. Yalestrom agreed. “But I see a lot of people who experience hallucinations of some kind for other reasons.”

“You think I’m going crazy,” Kevin guessed. Everyone else seemed to. Even his mom, presumably, since she’d been the one to bring him here after he’d started talking about them. He didn’t feel like he was going crazy, though.

“That’s not a word I like to use here,” Dr. Yalestrom said. “I think that often, the behavior that we label crazy is there for a good reason. It’s just that often, those reasons only make sense to the person concerned. People will do things to protect themselves from situations that are too difficult to handle, which seem to be… unusual.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing with these visions?” Kevin asked. He shook his head. “They’re real. I’m not making them up.”

“Can I tell you what I think, Kevin? I think a part of you might be attached to these ‘visions’ because it’s helping you to think that your illness might be happening for some kind of greater good. I think that maybe these ‘visions’ are actually you trying to make sense of your illness. The imagery in them… there’s a strange place that isn’t like the normal world. Could that represent the way things have changed?”