Mind’s Eye

FICTION

by Franz Jørgen Neumann

        Dr. Skow, punctual as ever. Cass turns from the window, licks her fingers, and snuffs out the incense stick. She runs the fan, plumps the sofa’s pillows, then glances again at the street below, imagining Diana pulling up behind the doctor instead of being late, again. Diana insists she understands Cass’s embarrassment at being stood up for their at-home couples counseling, but Cass bets she only gets the irony. Diana lacks a mind’s eye. She took part in an aphantasia study last year, giving Cass clinical confirmation that the woman she loves has an inability to picture their future together.
         “Knock knock,” Dr. Skow says.
         Cass opens the screen door. “Guess who isn’t here on time?” she says, but Dr. Skow doesn’t bite.
         Diana’s old Min Pin, Flea, walks arch-backed to the door, a cone of shame around her neck. The doctor leans down and holds out his fingers. Teary-eyed Flea approaches, sniffs, then slides away, the floor fan filling the sail of her cone.
         “Flea makes Diana feel old,” Cass says.
         Dr. Skow straightens, the rivulet vein on his forehead draining behind his pale skin. “Let’s wait to discuss until Diana arrives.”
         Cass notices that Dr. Skow hasn’t shaved, that his cotton shirt and slacks are uncharacteristically wrinkled. He looks like he’s recently been given a diagnosis. Cass’s funk lifts as she considers that the doctor might be in need of comfort.

         On my way, Diana types, then shoves her phone between her legs. Beside her on the passenger seat sit stacks of paperwork, with more on the floor under the fast-food wrappers. She half-listens to a podcast, bringing up the phone every ten minutes to tap-tap-tap past the sponsors’ ads. She’s mired in a clot of traffic gleaming beside the freeway-adjacent fiberglass Muffler Man who, when she was younger, was painted to look like a golfer for the nearby links. In its current incarnation, the twenty-some-foot statue holds a checkered flag and advertises the Porsche track behind him where taunting coupes whiz over the track’s rich asphalt as quickly as slot cars.
         The statue is one of the last remnants of the roadway kitsch that has come forward with Diana from her childhood. The rest of the route has changed as much as any river: oxbows of blight hidden behind ever-higher noise abatement walls, the tents of the homeless clinging to cut banks once thick with blooming ice plants. Only a few overpasses span intact from her childhood to today. Most everything else has been replaced at least once: the roadbed, the lighting, the number of lanes and signage. And then there’s what’s been lost in her own life: a divorced spouse, a son she thought would bury her, rather than the other way round. So much change, and she is only fifty-three.
         Almost home—though still late for the week’s counseling session—Diana doesn’t expect another car to belatedly snag her exit. The white Camaro cuts across three lanes of traffic and clips her car, sending her plowing up the embankment through pulverized dirt and dead weeds, missing a tree by the width of pure luck before the drifting arc of her travel deposits her back onto the exit ramp as though the last five seconds didn’t happen. No time for a breath—she’s rear-ended by an SUV and begins to spin, encapsulated within a silvery-white cloud of powdery noise that sends her into instant amnesia of the known world.
         Her paperwork—employee grievances, a benefits review, the amendments to a draft of a future contract—is flung through the shattered windows to blunder across the freeway. Loose-leaf paper skitters onto the filthy roadbed until stamped in place by passing tires. Commuters, even the good, gawk at her misfortune and feel their own forgotten luck recharge.
         This is how Cass imagines the crash. Diana simply said it happened in a flash.

         Cass watches Dr. Skow emerge from his car. “It’s not like him to be late. He looks worse than last time.”
         “Wait till he sees how the airbag ate my face,” Diana says, and turns off the TV.
         Diana has begun watching the finale episodes of her favorite TV shows, finales she avoided—goes her joke—so she’d have a treat to enjoy in retirement. She has streamed the final episodes of Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, and a dozen others. Even Cass saw the Cheers finale when it aired; she was eight years old. Dr. Skow has said that people process trauma and reach closure in a variety of ingenious ways, helping Cass reframe the annoyance of canned laughter as a therapeutic tool.

         Diana and the driver of the SUV are using the same lawyer. They’ve talked on the phone about Camaro Kid. If they can find him, there are new cars in their futures and settlements for pain and suffering. Kids can make mistakes, doesn’t Diana know, but she doesn’t feel sorry for Camaro Kid. Not when she saw the video from the witness’s dash cam. It’s 4k footage, the sun lighting up Camaro Kid and another freeway racer as they dart around traffic like children. 9–1–1 received several calls about their reckless driving, stretching all the way back to where the Muffler Man stood with his checkered flag. According to their lawyer, Camaro Kid is looking at some serious shit. The car is stolen, but they have a description. A PI is on the case.
         Diana will not admit this to anyone, not even to Dr. Skow, but she feels grateful for being pushed off the road by Camaro Kid. She was able to feel, physically, the force needed to alter the trajectory of her life, an energy she could never have mustered on her own. Were it not for the hit-and-run, she wouldn’t have been so quick to accept the new landscape around her, like saying yes to Cass’s proposal last month, followed by the quick civil ceremony, no pictures—maybe once the abrasions heal. Like discovering that Cass wants a child and—despite never wanting to be a mother again—finding herself here, with another baby-making session going on in the apartment behind her, the state of Cass’s cervical mucus calling the shots. Diana hooked Cass up with Ron, a former student of hers, and now a teacher himself. Broad-shouldered, solidly handsome, no family history of early onset disease or bloodline-connected addiction. The perfect donor.
         Diana sits outside on the steps with Ron’s wife, whose name, serendipitously, is also Diana. Ron and Diana have two strong, healthy kids surfing the top of their growth charts. The family is moving to Texas in a week, and Ron’s participation is being remunerated to the tune of their moving costs. This arrangement is cheaper than in vitro, and drugless—which is important to Cass. Diana feels it is also a kind of gift she is giving to Cass, though she doesn’t say this. The other Diana, Ron’s Diana, already has.
         When Diana sees Dr. Skow climbing from his car, she can’t help but laugh; she forgot all about their counseling session. What would the doctor think if he knew their spouses are just inside, screwing.

         Cass lies under the covers, still wearing her workout T-shirt and socks. In the bathroom, Ron. They have it down to an art. Ron gets himself nearly there, then exits the bathroom primed but fully dressed, except for what he can’t successfully hide behind his hands. Then he’s under the covers, a few tight, uncomfortable pumps, and, bless him, he tries his best to remain fully silent as he ejaculates as deeply as possible, giving her cervix a twinge. They tend to laugh right after. It isn’t the worst sex with a man she’s ever had. Ron climbs from the bed and cleans himself up in the bathroom.
         Cass knows it’s a superstition, but she swivels around on the bed and places her feet above the headboard to direct Ron’s men deeper. There are earlier prints above hers on the wall; how do her feet get so filthy? She stuffs a pillow under her butt and imagines the future. She and Diana will need to move to a two-bedroom apartment, maybe a three-bedroom—twins run in Cass’s family and in women in her decade. She’d thought she was too late for motherhood, that Diana, with all of her lost baggage, wouldn’t want to come along for the ride. She walks her feet a bit higher up the eggshell-colored wall to the heights she reached last time, then crawls a few inches higher. She hears the toilet flush.
         “Onward, men,” Ron says at the bedroom door, his job complete.
         She looks back and waves goodbye. She’ll likely never see Ron again; Texas is on her shit list. She feels momentarily dizzy from the effort of looking upside down, but she senses that this feeling is the first hint that one of Ron’s soldiers will take. She places her arms under her lower back and walks higher up the wall, her feet reaching even to the ceiling where a sudden lightness overcomes her. She begins waltzing around the light fixture.

         Dr. Skow makes way for Ron and Diana on the stairs. Diana waves to the pair and the doctor also turns and waves like he knows them.
         “You look happy,” he says.
         “What’s happened to you, though?”
         Dr. Skow clears his throat. “Tax issues.” He reaches out his hand and lets Flea, quivering in Diana’s arms, sniff his fingers and receive a quick scratch. “Shall we begin?”
         “Let’s give Cass a few minutes.”
         “Is she late now?”
         “Here’s hoping.” Diana lets Flea down to sniff at the scrubby plantings.
         “You have a daughter, don’t you?” she asks.
         “Grown. She doesn’t speak to me.”
         Better silence than absolute silence, Diana thinks. She vows she’ll be more vigilant, more loving, more present this time around. But not a mother, not again. She and Cass have agreed that their future child can know her by whatever title Diana wishes to be known by: She Who Will Never Find Herself Mourning You, or My Mother’s Death-Until-They-Part Wife, or simply, Diana.
         Dr. Skow walks off to take a call, and looks ill when he returns.
         “You okay, Dr. Skow?”
         He gives her a thin smile. Diana senses that every muscle in his face is corroborating a lie. He, after all, schooled them in microexpressions. To see that even her therapist is being run ragged by life feels like a dirty blessing.

         A year later, an investigator pays them a visit at their tiny fixer-upper, the down payment courtesy of the savings Diana accumulated from years of teaching summer school. It was to be her just-in-case money, her fuck-you money, recession money, future-cancer-cost money—a little pot for whatever additional horror was rung up on her personal register.
         Cass creeps out of the bedroom, closes the door, and sits down with her and the PI, the baby monitor hissing on the kitchen counter. The PI looks at them blankly when Diana asks about Camaro Kid. She’s here about Max Skow. They learn that Dr. Skow—who stopped showing up to their sessions months ago (and who they can’t afford now, anyway)—is missing, presumably evading tax-evasion charges. Have they seen him, heard from him? They also learn that Dr. Skow isn’t a psychologist or a doctor of any sort. He has a bachelor’s in theatre arts. Surely the wrong Skow, but no, the investigator shows them a photo. At the ridiculousness of the situation, out it comes from them both. Canned laughter.
         Late that night, carefully lowering the sweet bundle of warmth into the bassinet beside Cass, Diana recalls the counseling session when Cass admitted she wanted a child. As a thought experiment, Dr. Skow asked her to visualize a future where Cass’s desire was actualized. And though she couldn’t picture such a reality at the time, the future has slotted into the present, leaving her sleepless but overflowing, squeezed thin but rich, exhausted but filled with joy. There was no trick to it at all but to hold on tight and wait.