The low sun made the Charles River gleam like a shattered mirror. The gilded domes and glass facades of Boston sparkled like a looted jewelry case. Brenda had Nantucket on the brain when she got up and peeked into the waiting room.
It had been a quiet day so far, knock on wood. No rumblings in the coat closet. The spider plant had stayed rooted its pot by the window. Her Kevlar jumpsuit remained neatly folded under the fire ax in the panic box. Helen, her intrepid receptionist, had not needed to trouble security all day.
Jerome, the on-call maintenance tech, was on his knees behind the reception booth, patching a hole in the dry wall, but that was no big deal. A Category IV had gotten a little impatient waiting to be seen and his imagination had gotten the better of him. Because of such issues, the waiting room had no magazines or TV. Too much fuel for the active mind was the thinking. Brenda had to wonder, though, what harm a few celebrity mags and insipid talk shows could do compared to the chaos that reigned in some of her client’s heads.
Her last patient of the day sat slumped in the corner, a thirty-something heap of scars and rumpled clothes and tousled hair—par for the course for a shaper. His name was Brian Schroll, uncategorized as yet, but triaged as an urgent case, tagged on at the last minute to her regular schedule of appointments.
Like most of her clients, Brian had the haunted eyes of someone who feared both sleep and wakefulness, for whom every day was a waking nightmare. Shapers believed their dreams and imaginations could manifest real in the world both with and without their consent. The extreme cases—Category IVs and Vs—acted like minor gods. Many could not resist intervening in the affairs of the world. Yet few could corral their emissions. Unintended consequences and collateral damage were the norm. The more malicious and troubled among them committed vicious pranks and deadly crimes. Such cases, she tried to identify before they became a public threat.
Shaping was such a rare condition that it wasn’t even described in the DSM-5—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Brenda had built a career on helping people find their way out of the forest of malcreation and back to reality. Fundamental to any cure was convincing them that their experiences were mere delusion. That wasn’t always easy, particularly with Category IIIs and above, who had tangible reasons to believe in their powers.
“Brian? Please come in and have a seat.”
Brian rose from the leatherette couch, revealing the shredded sleeve of his flannel shirt. It looked like it had gotten caught in a hedge trimmer. Tuft of sandy brown hair poked in random directions. An oddly regular pattern of scabs formed something that looked like a zipper down the side of his neck.
He limped into the office and descended heavily into the cushy armchair beside the solid oak desk she always made sure she kept between her and her patients.
His voice had the hoarse edge of a heavy smoker. “Hey … uh … thanks so much for working me into your schedule on such short notice. I mean, I just found out about your practice today. I had no idea there were people who specialized in my … uh … situation.”
“Yes, well … it’s not like we can advertise,” Brenda said, pouring hot water into her mug. “But word gets around. Our patients seem to find us.”
“I was worried about coming down here on the bus. It wasn’t easy, but I think I did okay. Nobody got hurt. Helps that it’s such a bright, sunny day.”
“Care for a cup of tea?”
“No … I … uh … I’d better not. You never know what might happen. My imagination has been kind of … uh … overactive these days.
Brenda crinkled her eyebrows at that remark as she dipped her tea bag. What harm could he possibly conjure from a cup of Earl Grey?
“My receptionist tells me you sounded pretty desperate on the phone. So tell me, Brian, how has your week been? Or more to the point, how is your day going?”
“Um. Not so good. This shaping business, it’s been getting worse. Used to be something bad would happen a couple times a week, but now it’s like … every day… couple times a day. And getting more and more intense.”
“And why do you suppose that is? Has anything changed with you? Any new developments in your life?”
“Nah. Not really. I’m unemployed. Lost my job a couple months ago. I pretty much just hole up at home.”
“May I ask what happened to your shirt?”
He closed his eyes and shuddered. “You don’t want to know. Trust me. And I’m afraid to tell you. It might … make it happen again.”
Brenda leaned to get a better view of his shoulder. A darker blotch interrupted the regular checkerboard of his plaid. “Are you okay? Looks like you’re bleeding.”
He shrugged. “No big deal. It’s just a scratch. I’ve had worse.”
Discretely, Brenda reached under her desk and unclipped the latches of her panic box. She engaged the switch that would notify Helen that she was dealing with a live one, in case she hadn't already realized it. Nothing to be concerned about, really. Only that some shapers were more hazardous than others and required extra precautions.
She beamed a broad smile at her client that she hoped he found calming and reassuring.
“If I’m going to be of any help to you, Brian, you’re going to have to be willing to share such things with me. I can’t help you without knowing all the details. But … let’s start with the general and work our way deeper. Tell me, on a scale of one to ten, what is your overall outlook on life, with ten being ecstatic, one—suicidal?”
“Two,” he said, without hesitation.
“Really? Things are that bad for you?”
“Um … yeah.”
“What about relationships? Do you have friends? A significant other, perhaps?”
“Well, I did, until all this crap started happening. I had a girlfriend. Lived with her up till a couple weeks ago. But I had to move out. For her protection. My parents … um … passed away … a few months back … accident … so the old house was available. But that hasn’t worked out so great. Too many memories. I mean, all the stuff that used to freak me out as a kid is coming back to haunt me. Literally.”
“When you were with this partner of yours. Do you ever get angry? Lose control? Physically. Get violent?”
“It’s not me that gets violent. I can control myself. It’s the things I shape that get me into trouble. Once they’re unleashed, there’s no stopping them.”
“And what sorts of things do you … shape?”
“You name it. Little stuff mostly, but it can get pretty wild. It’s whatever’s in my head. This little twist happens in my brain and whamo! It happens. Like, I’d see Jenny slicing cucumbers and worry about the way she was holding the knife. And then … my worry would come true … she goes ahead and does it … cuts herself … like a minute later.”
“Sounds like coincidence to me.”
“If it happened only once or twice … I could see. But stuff like this kept happening, over and over. Like, we’d be in bed. My leg would brush against the blanket and I’d get this image in my head of some rodent or something running across the mattress. I’d flick on the lights, and there’d be a rat sitting there on the bedspread, looking at us. It was worse at night. All the stupid, clichés that used to freak me out as a kid kept coming back. You know, like monsters in the closet. Under the bed. All it took was a thought to flash into my head and there’d be some creature growling and clunking around in the closet all night. Good thing Jenny was a deep sleeper. But I’d be up all night fighting with the door, trying to keep the damned thing contained till morning. Once the sun came up it would be gone, but the damage would be there. The veneer would be all splintered off and raked with claw marks. Clothes would be ripped off hangers, trampled and shredded. You don’t know how much of Jenny’s stuff I had to replace. The thing even took a dump in the corner. That’s when I started taking Ambien. Knocked me out quick before any weird crap could form in my brain. Or so I thought. I discovered, though, that this crap doesn’t just happen when I’m
awake. Dreams can trigger it, too, and believe me; Ambien can generate some weird dreams.”
“I tore up the prescription after a couple of freaky incidents. Jenny, she kept waking up with these bite marks. So I basically stopped sleeping at night. I would lay awake and sneak out of bed when I heard her drift off. I'd lock her in the bedroom and go sit in the living room by myself, where I could deal better with whatever got summoned. I stopped reading books, watching movies, the news, or anything that would trigger my imagination. That’s how I got into Sudoku. Nothing better than abstract numbers for emptying my head of the scary stuff.”
“Are you absolutely certain it wasn’t you who did that damage in the closet?” said Brenda. “Could you have been sleepwalking and not aware?”
Brian narrowed his gaze. “You don’t believe me.”
“I’m just trying to rule out alternative explanations.”
He clenched his jaw and glared. “Why would I shit in my own closet? Listen. The stuff I conjure … it’s all real. Some of them have real teeth and claws. Plenty of people … innocent people … have paid the price. They even attack me, sometimes.”
“Nights, especially, are when the dangerous ones come out. I try to prevent them, but there are parts of your brain that you just can’t turn off. When I moved back to the old house, I pulled all the furniture out of my bedroom. Tossed my mom’s old knick-knacks. Cut all the trees down in the yard. Got rid of anything that would cast a shadow. I even covered the windows with black plastic. It wasn’t totally effective, but it helped calm things down.”
“Sometimes, though, I get stuck outside after dark … with all those noises and shapes and shadows … and then it’s game over. You know all those homicides and disappearances that have been happening? The unsolved ones?” He took a deep breath. “This is hard for me to admit, but some of them … they’re things I conjure. I don’t know what it is about corn fields! Oh, the creatures my mind concocts out of those ragged stalks once the sun goes down! I don’t even know what to call them. They start off like little haystacks and then shape themselves into whatever fear rises to the top of my head. Sasquatches. Aliens. Un-nameable things. Even clowns. And they follow people. Hurt them. Sometimes even kill them.”
“Halloweens are the worst! Last year I had to work late. Took a bus home. Tried not to look out the window. Had my ear buds in, iPod on, playing the blandest new age techno I could find on iTunes. I had to glance now and then to see where we were in the burbs. Kept seeing all these cute little kids in their costumes. But every time we passed a corn field, shit got conjured. Bad stuff went down in the wake of that bus. It got blamed on teenagers. Rough pranksters. Thank God those kids survived. But that was … last year.”
“This year, I didn’t take any chances. I called in sick. Stayed home. When the sun went down I kept the lights off and barricaded myself in my empty bedroom. Buried my head under a pillow. Still, my brain went places I didn’t want to go and I could hear things prowling out there in the dark. These things … they had no shape … but I knew they were terrible. And this time, a kid and his mom were killed, walking past a cornfield. You might have heard about it. Got blamed on coyotes. But that wasn’t any coyotes. It was the things that came from my head. The stuff that sticks around even when I empty my thoughts.”
“And like I said, things are getting worse. Used to be easy to keep my head clear in the daylight. But not anymore. “You know that private jet that crashed out in Topsfield about a month ago?”
“I remember hearing something about it in the news. Why?”
“That was me. My doing. I stepped out into my backyard just to get some fresh air. There's only so much a guy can stand of living in an empty, blacked-out house. Besides, I had to check the mail. It was a beautiful day. Warm for April. Puffy clouds. I saw something in the sky and I looked up, thinking it was a hawk. A red tail had carried off one of the neighbor’s kittens a few weeks back. But it was a plane. One of those Lear jets flying really high. And before I could stop my brain, I imagined that plane tucking its wings and diving like a hawk does going after prey. And … the wings … they snapped back, both of them, just like I commanded. And the plane tumbled down. Seven people died.”
“You do realize … that’s impossible.”
“Do I?”
“That’s what I’m here for. To show you how impossible that is. Not just the plane incident, but everything you’ve been telling me.”
“You still don’t believe me.”
“I didn’t say that. But it doesn’t matter what I believe or don’t believe. I am here to consider everything you tell me in deriving a diagnosis and a plan of treatment. But you must have doubts yourself. Otherwise, why would you come see a counselor?”
“I heard you guys were specialists. That you deal with us … shapers.”
“And we do. But how do you think we accomplish that?”
“I was hoping there would be like some kind of pill I could take to tamp down my imagination, let me concentrate on everyday reality. I only get in trouble when I let myself think bad thoughts. When I don’t see shadows as shadows. When my mind keeps spinning off metaphors and tangents. If there was a pill that would let me experience things literally, objectively … the way other people do.”
Brenda studied Brian’s face carefully, keeping her hand close to the desk drawer in case he became motivated to conjure something as an example. She never knew what to expect with these shapers. They were usually benign but some wearied of their responsibility to the world of reality. Sometimes they lashed out.
“So are there … such pills?” said Brian with a wistful, hopeful look in his eyes.
“There are plenty of pills on the market that might do some of what you’re asking. Central nervous system depressants—sedatives—that slow everything down. But really all you need is two fingers of vodka to accomplish the same. But then we’re dealing with other problems. Addiction. Tolerance. Risk of overdose and interaction. SSRIs and SNRIs like Zoloft and Effexor are a little more targeted on specific receptors, but their effects can be rather unpredictable. Same thing goes for the anti-anxiety meds. In some patients, there is no effect. They’re no better than placebos. In rare cases they can have the opposite effect and aggravate the condition we’re trying to treat. And we don’t want that, do we?”
“No. We don’t.”
“So with chemicals, it’s a crap shoot. What I recommend to most of my patients is a course of CBT—cognitive behavioral therapy. A series of weekly sessions over months that will train your mind to find safe channels of thought, to avoid the darker avenues and eventually to even double back to safety once a reaction is already underway.
He smirked. “You mean like … uncrash that plane?”
Brenda just smiled back at him. With shapers, one had to keep them believing that there is some element of doubt to their experiences, no matter what physical proof might exist.
“You honestly don’t believe me … that I can make my thoughts real.”
There was darkness in his gaze and danger in the set of his chin. They could be extra moody, these shapers. Sleeplessness and trauma will do that. The littlest things could set them off.
“Like I said … it’s not a matter of my belief. It’s of no benefit to you for me to acknowledge the reality of your experiences.”
“Oh my God! You think I’m making this up. You think I’m delusional.”
“I never said that. I just need you to be open … to the possibility … of psychosis.”
His eyes nearly popped out of his head.
“You want me to pretend this is all fake? That the swamp monster I conjured in that pond never swallowed that mother duck and her ducklings and then tried to after a little girl and her mom? That I never willed that car to crash into a tree just because the guy cut me off on the entrance ramp? You know how many people have died because of me?”
Brenda maintained her discipline, displaying a studied neutral smile that demonstrated attentiveness whil
e remaining agnostic.
Brian’s eyes went wider. “What the fuck? I was led to believe you guys were different, that you could actually help me. But you think this is all bullshit, don’t you? I can see it in that smarmy little smirk of yours.”
Smarmy? That had not been her intention at all. But when she was nervous, her body language got a little warped. She adjusted her smile, but it was too late.
“You think I’m making all this up? Well okay, then. You know that little mole on your wrist? I notice stuff like that. I see something like that, I worry. I worry for people. Because I’m a worrier. I worry that little brown moles turn cancerous.”
Brenda glanced down at the spot she preferred to think of as a freckle. What had been flat and round and a healthy brown was now an ugly, protruding, asymmetrical lump mottled tan and purple and black—a melanoma. She took a deep breath and made a note to set up an emergency appointment with her dermatologist.
Brenda realized now that she was not dealing with some routine Category III shaper. This Brian fellow was a serious threat—emotionally unstable with fatigue-induced psychosis. She reconsidered the question of broad action pharmaceuticals, if only as an emergency measure. A powerful sedative would do wonders towards containing his imagination right about now, but she had used all her emergency syringes. She had some rohypnol samples in her drawer. Could she convince him to take some?
She noticed his balled fists. His face was red. He was breathing hard and open mouthed.
“What about now? Do you believe me now? No? What if I made your desk come alive? Would you believe me then?”
The top of her desk bulged and bowed with rippling musculature. The legs sprouted cloven hooves and it surged against her Herman Miller Aeron chair, pinning her against the oversized Monet poster that decorated the wall behind her.
She reached for the panic box but her desk kept ramming her, moaning like a flatulent bull. Her stapler sprouted jointed, metallic appendages and leapt onto her chest, sinking it’s two-pronged aluminum fangs into her bare shoulder her phone charger unplugged itself and went snaking up the meshed back of her chair, slithering around her neck, cinching tight. A wave of animation spread to a parade of odd creatures. A bottle of Evian water bent at the waist and hissed at her, chomping its threaded maw. A pair of orange-gripped Fiskar scissors stalked her across a stack of manila folders. A stack of invoices folded themselves into origami scorpions ready to inflict a thousand paper cuts.