Hansel & Gretel

FICTION

by Mariana Villas-Boas

A man goes to a new therapist. At the entrance to the building, there’s a flower bed and it forebodes nothing good. Too groomed. Oppressive even. The flowers are milimetrically placed and no stray leaves litter the rich soil. Its damp smell of darkness beckons. He is almost insulted by the flowers’ blooms. The audacity of those giant purple spheres reaching as high as his hips like that, plopped on thin stalks. They look like purple lollipops. Ridiculous. What’s worse, the stalks are nestled in a jumble of long leaves, bent like spider legs, and this makes them feel slightly sinister.
         He won’t easily admit he knows what these flowers are called. Alliums are their name. The man bends over to take a closer look at the tight mesh of purple-petalled stars. He squints to get inside the hollow orb of the bloom, disappears for a moment inside it, then snaps himself out of it and walks inside to where the therapist is waiting for him.
         The man’s elegant coat is dappled from a brisk spring shower. He’s carefully pulling out of the sleeves when he spots her patiently waiting at the door to her office. He’s nearly startled at the sight of her dishevelled hair, but thinks of the flower bed outside and inches toward relief instead.
         They sit. The first few moments are awkward. There’s the usual psychoanalytic layout: the books with their broken spines, the non-suggestive artwork, the old leather couch that sucks at his body as he settles into it. He keeps rearranging his limbs. She sits with rehearsed ease. They are both wearing paper masks hooked behind the ears and only the top halves of their faces are visible. It’s hard to read each other’s reactions. The masks are a common safety precaution now, because of the pandemic. The first wave is only now tapering off and there is talk of a second and a third. The man wonders if the vaccine, when it comes, will be safe. Will it kill him before the virus? He thinks about it a lot. His skin is chafed and dried white at the knuckles from too much hand sanitiser.
         He gets a better look at her and realizes he was wrong about the hair. It is undoubtedly wayward, wilful even, but there is a desire for order in that tight mesh of curls. She seems to have applied too much of some sort of leave-in conditioner, poor dear, but at least she tried to do something. When she moves her head, the hair moves with it in stiff rotation, like a helmet. No bounce, no subtlety. It’s disconcerting to watch. He shouldn’t judge her too harshly for being unskilled. It’s clearly a head of hair she’s struggled with her whole life, must have caused her years of disappointment and now sits on her weary head like a bad marriage. Doesn’t help that she’s dyed it out of a bottle with a colour too dark and even for her age, although he understands, of course he does, that she would want to deal with those roots before sitting down with clients, especially when salons have been closed for months, his included. He leans back into the leather couch, feels more relaxed now and is even enjoying its possessive sucking on his warm body.
         Talking through masks makes him a little dizzy. A therapist listens mostly, so it won’t be much of a problem for her. Her eyes float above the rim of the mask and, without a face to anchor them, look even more direct, more blue, more questioning. He wants to know what other information he can gather from those eyes.
         “So,” she says.
         “So,” he says. “I was worried about the flower bed coming in.” He means this as a little joke, wants to see if her eyes smile too when her masked lips do. When he smiles, he smiles with his whole face. Even his eyebrows smile. He’s a man of easy emotion and he likes this about himself, about his people. 
         “Oh?” she replies. “What about it?”
         “It’s too idyllic. You should be wary of anything that idyllic. It’s just not human.”
         “I see.”
         “You find that a lot here,” he says.
         “What do you mean?”
         “In Switzerland.”
         “No, what do you mean when you say ‘just not human’?” she asks.
         “Nothing, I guess. It was a joke.”
         His attempt at humour has fallen flat or maybe she’s just difficult to read. He feels this often now and realizes how much he relied on body language to communicate with people before. Adding masks and video calls to the stiffness already prevalent in this neck of the woods makes reading social cues very difficult now for a man of easy emotion.
         “So what brings you here?” she asks, trying to kick things off again. His correct but ineptly pronounced German sounds a little gauche compared to her crisp native accent. Hers has the light touch of something just beyond the border, Bavaria perhaps, but he can’t be sure. In any case, it adds to the Freudian theatrics of the whole thing, which, of course, he’s well versed in. He has a soft spot for the sweet seduction of analysis.
         “I’m depressed,” he exclaims. It comes out a little jauntier than he intended and he feels the need to reel it in. “Not suicidal or anything, just depressed. My mind is wearing thin. It needs some fattening up.” He chuckles, then goes serious. “I guess a lot of people feel that way with everything that’s going on.”
         At the moment, it feels like this statement requires no explanation, but the man knows that in forty years, he’ll have to explain it to his grandchildren that there was this pandemic and no one really knew what it was, but it was highly contagious and some people barely felt anything, but others got really sick and lots of people died. Doctors didn’t really understand it and, because it was a time when people travelled a lot, the disease spread, quick and deadly. The whole world came to an abrupt standstill. You had to keep your distance from people outside your cluster, or the virus—vulpine, hungry, blind—would take you in her claws. Back home, he and his brother moved their mother to a different nursing facility, where they thought she’d be safe, but she caught the virus there and died anyway. No goodbye. No funeral. It’s shocking to think about it now, but people used to shake hands at meetings with perfect strangers. People used to have sex with random people they met at parties.
         “Now that the measures have eased a little, I’m having trouble going back to my life,” he says. “Small things irritate me. People picnicking as if nothing happened and supermarkets,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Don’t get me started on the supermarkets.”
         “What about supermarkets?” she asks.
         “People don’t respect social distancing at all. Fruit and vegetables are a goddamn circus. Everyone on top of each other. Even if you wear a mask and gloves, nobody gives you space. No one follows the rules. I thought people here liked rules.”
         She doesn’t say anything.
         “I just try to get in and out as fast as possible. The supermarket as a whole, but the fresh foods section in particular.” 
         “It makes you anxious,” she observes.
         “There’s this woman,” he says, sitting up. “She’s there in front of the bananas and you know what she does? She pulls single bananas off of different bunches and puts them in her little reusable bag. Takes her sweet time too. I mean, really, who does that? Then you have a normal guy like me. I just want to swing by, grab a bunch, and get out of there, but I can’t because not only is she slow as hell, she’s breaking up all the bunches.” 
         “It must be difficult holding all these complex feelings together,” she says.
         He crosses his arms and huffs. “I’ve caught her doing this twice. Next time, we’ll have words.”
         She hmmms. “Perhaps there is a reason for her habit,” she says. “By taking bananas from different bunches with different levels of ripeness, perhaps she is just trying to ensure an equally ripe banana to eat each morning. Maybe she does not want to start the week with overly green bananas and end it with overly ripe ones. If you live on your own, it is actually the right way to buy bananas.”
         “The right way to buy bananas?” He says this with barely suppressed irritation.
         “There may be a reason for it, is my point.” 
         “You see this is the problem, right? Wanting everything to be the same. Wanting the bananas always to be equally ripe. Life just isn’t like that.” He’s sitting on the edge of the couch now. “Not going through all the stages of the banana is like not going through all the stages of life. The firm, the just ripe, the mottled but even sweeter. We need them all! Don’t you think we need them all?”
         “You are upset,” she says.
         “It’s this Swiss thing,” he says, “of wanting everything to be the same, predictable. It drives me crazy.”
         “What do you feel is wrong with it?”
         “It’s so goddamn boring!”
         Coolly, she replies, “There was a politician—I can’t remember his name—that once said the Swiss work hard to keep their country boring. To some, a normal, boring country is a great success.”
         “Who in their right mind would want that?” he blurts out, a little exasperated.
         “What to some is boring, to others is safe, sustaining.” The lids of her eyes narrow and elongate. He can see her crow’s feet clearly. She’s smiling under the mask.
         He crashes back into the couch. “I think I’m suicidal now,” he says flatly.
         When their time is up, he walks out and finds himself in front of the flower bed again. Before he knows he’s done it, he quickly snaps the allium stalks in two. First one, then another. Standing there with a purple wand in each hand, he panics, suddenly aware of all the sounds around him—a dog barking nearby, a distant lawnmower. Are those footsteps he hears drawing near or fading away? Flustered, he shoves the flower heads into his coat pockets. They burst into a shower of purple petals that pool at his feet. He rushes off with petals fluttering behind him, long green stalks sticking out of his pockets, a trail of tiny purple stars tracing his course.