Book Nine, Chapter 40: Talk It Out

“Riley, Dr. Mentes can see you now,” a voice said. It was a pleasant voice, a woman’s voice. She had to repeat herself because the first time I heard it, I wasn’t quite mentally aware enough to react.

“Riley, Dr. Mentes can see you,” she said again.

Where was I?

Oh right, I can open my eyes.

I was alone in a fairly small but professional-looking room. I sat on a clean brown couch. This was some kind of waiting room. Maybe I had a dentist appointment. If so, I would be running toward the exit. The walls had pleasant floral patterns that subtly reminded me of an inkblot test. Maybe it could have been even subtler.

The woman called to me again. She didn’t have a desk in the room that I could see. She was poking her head out of a large set of double doors and staring straight at me. Brown hair, a mousy face, and a smile that was growing thin the more I ignored her.

“I’ll be right there,” I said mostly out of habit. I still hadn’t really awoken yet. I needed to do the standard pat-down and check my pockets to see if I could learn anything about my character. By now, it was routine.

My hoodie had remarkably stayed, but now I wore a thin jacket over it, something to keep the rain off perhaps. Water still beaded on the outside.

I checked my pockets, including my wallet. Everything seemed ordinary. There was no hint as to my identity other than the fact that I had recently purchased an all-you-can-eat buffet at a Chinese restaurant. I might have thought that the receipt was leftover from back home on Earth, except that the name of the restaurant was The Emperor’s Tomb, which was definitely on the Carousel side of naming standards.

The waiting room was too sterile to find any useful information. I would have to move forward to figure out what was going on. I stood up, stretched my legs, and walked, noticing that my body was tired. Carousel had instantiated me into this storyline without a full tank of gas. With the nature of the apocalypse, it didn’t want us avoiding sleep for too long.

I walked across the room toward the double doors and greeted the NPC. She had no name and was simply labeled Secretary. I followed her down a long hallway in what turned out to be a very tall building. I only found that out when she led me to an office with a large, open wooden door labeled Dr. Truman Mentes, and I could see out the window.

Mentes. I knew that name. I had met him before.

She opened the door for me and then turned to leave. Only then did I notice there was no place in the building for a secretary. There was a hallway, a waiting room, and an office. That was strange for a doctor’s office, except for one specific kind.

This would be some sort of psychiatrist, analyst, head shrinker, or therapist. I had suspected that Truman Mentes was the Psychiatrist Paragon, an aspect of the Doctor archetype, when I first met him and later confirmed it in the Atlas. I hadn’t seen him since running Subject of Inquiry, where he played a cold scientist doing experiments on a family of psychics and some hapless players who just happened to sign up for jobs at the facility.

In movies and TV, there rarely is any sort of secretary at a therapist’s office. Often, a main character who went to therapy would be found in the waiting room just as I had been, and the only other person you would see in the office besides the doctor was the patient who was there before you.

Back on Earth, the counselors I would go to after my parents died always had secretaries or assistants, not that I would have known the difference at the time.

This secretary went back through the double doors into the waiting room and then presumably left the building altogether. It wouldn’t matter. None of it was On-Screen, not until I walked through the office door to see the tall Latino man with his back turned to me. Only then did the cameras see me, but only for a moment at first, just long enough for Truman Mentes to turn around and distractedly greet me.

“Mr. Lawrence, you’ll forgive me if I’m running a little behind today. As you can see, we’ve had some fairly major construction in the office.” He gestured toward the walls around us, which had painters’ cloth neatly draped down over them, supported by even rows of thumbtacks. The furniture, including a desk and several shelving units, had been covered in plastic.

In fact, the only space that wasn’t marked off for construction was the stereotypical couch that a psychiatrist’s patient might lay down on and, of course, the armchair the doctor himself would sit in.

It suddenly occurred to me that, for as often as I had seen therapy and psychiatry in movies and on TV, I didn’t know what any of it really was. My experience with it was so long ago that I didn’t even have a working vocabulary for it, and I had actively avoided discussions of psychology that didn’t involve serial killers.

I was going to have to choose my words carefully so that I didn’t convey how ignorant I was. Luckily, I knew that Carousel wasn’t going to stick too close to the facts. It was strange how different some professions looked on the silver screen. Therapy is an expository device in a movie. It isn't about helping anyone.

But if this scene was about exposition, it was very poorly done because, shortly after he had me lie down on the couch with another gesture, we went back Off-Screen, and we stayed that way even as Dr. Mentes stayed in character. He did jump around a little bit from subject to subject.

“Riley, since our last session, have you had any more depressive episodes?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “but we recently did a beach episode.”

I was making a silly, stupid joke about our adventures on Saltspar Island. After all, we were Off-Screen. As long as I got enough information about the storyline, it didn’t really matter what I said.

“A beach episode?” Dr. Mentes asked. “Would this be related to your work in film and television?”

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Apparently he wasn't going to play along with my meta tomfoolery.

It seemed I was actually a filmmaker again in this story. Carousel wasn’t really reaching too far with that one.

“Yeah,” I said. “We had to outsmart a slasher chasing us around on an island during a hurricane.”

“It’s interesting that you say that,” the doctor said. “After all, you are in charge on the film set, aren’t you? So really, you set up the situation, and you outsmarted the obstacles. It was all you.”

What did that mean?

“I’m smart enough to share credit,” I said.

He smiled at me for a moment, but then his eyes glossed over. He was in his mid-fifties, probably, his hair fairly short but neatly combed back. His eyes were tired. He hadn’t been sleeping well, and the way that he dressed himself was uncharacteristically relaxed. Of course the last time I had seen him, he had been wearing a lab coat.

Still, even if he was tired, his shoulders didn’t slump. He kept his posture, and his voice projected powerfully over the room, even as it slowed down when his mind grew distant.

On-Screen.

“In our last session, we discussed your parents’ death. We said that we would touch on it again this week. Do you remember?” he asked.

“Is that what we decided?” I asked in a jokey manner.

He sat with his legs crossed, and he stared down at his notebook without answering me for a few moments. I had not interacted with the good doctor too many times, but I could tell that he was a good actor because his character was clearly going through something. He wasn’t just tired.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you distracted?”

His eyes glanced over toward the distant wall as if he were reading a message on the scattered, paint-stained cloth.

Instead of answering me, he dropped right back into the attentive psychiatrist character.

“Horror movies, that is your specialty, right?” he asked. “Death, dismemberment, monsters of fantasy and science fiction?”

“Yup, that’s me,” I said. “I know it’s not for everybody, but the people it’s for care about it a whole lot.”

“Who’s it for?” he asked.

Oh no.

“Horror fans,” I said.

“That’s a bit tautological, wouldn’t you say?” he asked. “Horror is for horror fans. What would you say might incline someone toward horror fandom?”

Don't say psychopathy. Don't say psychopathy. Don't say...

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think a big part of it is that there’s a thrill in being scared, and also it’s a relatively safe out-group to belong to, especially if you grew up in a socially conservative place. It kind of filters out people who are stodgy and closed-minded. Not perfectly, but it does filter many out. That’s not to say that everyone who likes horror is an outsider. I don’t know. It’s really hard to talk about trends. Why are you asking?”

“You know, this really works better when I ask the questions,” Dr. Mentes said.

I didn’t know enough about psychiatry to contradict him.

“Okay, so ask,” I said.

“Do you see yourself as being an outsider?” he asked.

“No, I’m more of a film buff,” I said, not only because I thought it was kind of funny, but because I thought it made sense in character too.

“What does that mean, to be a film buff?”

“I just like movies,” I said. “I like escapism. I like how orderly they are. Movies lined up on shelves by genre and subgenre. Rated by quality and a dozen X factors. Each one is like its own little world, and every person who’s seen it has been there.”

“What do you mean when you say escapism?” he asked.

I hesitated to answer because I didn't want another little needling question.

“Sometimes it feels nice to leave your situation behind and go engage with situations that are bigger and different and more extreme than the ones you’re really dealing with. At the very least, you can take your mind off things,” I said.

“Do you think...” He started to ask, but then his eyes darted back to the wall behind me again, and he paused for fifteen seconds or so.

“I apologize for the noise. It’s the plumbing, or wind shear...” he said eventually. “That’s what the construction crew is fixing.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

He gave me a disconcerting look, but then quickly covered it up as he straightened up in his chair and looked back down at his notes.

“A lot of people would find engaging with representations of nightmares as the opposite of escapism,” he eventually said. “Why is it that you decide to run toward these images and concepts that many would consider depressing or frightful?”

What was Carousel up to with this line of questioning?

“I think the virtue of horror,” I said after contemplating my answer for a moment, “is that it’s fictional. It isn’t real. The fact is that once you’ve experienced an emotion or engaged with a particular type of fantasy, it can become hard to ignore it in the future. I wouldn’t say that people who like horror are death-obsessed exactly, but it can be, I don’t know, therapeutic, for lack of a better word, to be able to re-explore some of those feelings and ideas in a situation where you can’t get hurt. It’s like swimming in a swimming pool instead of the ocean.”

I had used this exact same type of reasoning to explain my obsession with horror many times before, to try and make it seem reasonable and downright almost normal. People who knew about my parents always assumed that I got into the genre because I was exposed to death at a young age. Little did they know I was already a fan of scary movies by then.

The thing was, Dr. Mentes stared at me like I had said something poignant or incredibly relevant to the plot. The way he looked at me, I had to assume that the cameras were doing something, maybe zooming in on his face, as his eyes flickered back toward the wall behind me and then toward another wall to our left.

“You believe that because something isn’t real, it can’t hurt you?” he asked, saying it as if it was a notion that he had been thoroughly disabused of quite recently.

I had seen this type of character acting before. His mannerisms and behavior reminded me of so many horror-movie characters who dealt with the big bad before the movie even began, leaving the audience to wonder why they were acting that way.

What had Dr. Mentes seen?

Obviously, his dialogue was about Highbrow Hew and a dream that spread from person to person. “Imaginary things cannot hurt you" was clearly a theme being contested by whatever movie this ended up being made into.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t make horror movies about killers because there’s no such thing as killers. I do it because horror should not only belong to monsters and murderers. Humanity is fascinated by what scares us. It’s the reason we sit around fires and tell stories. We do it to bring ourselves together. I don’t know. Maybe the movie theater is the modern-day campfire. Is that too pretentious to say?”

Dr. Mentes cleared his throat and eventually regained eye contact with me. “Scary things bring humans together,” he said, summarizing my point. “That is certainly a pretty thought. You know, one of my other patients...”

He trailed off and became lost in thought.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” he eventually said. “I was a little too optimistic to believe that we could have a productive therapy session in this environment. I... I’m afraid we’ll have to reschedule. I apologize for all the noise.”

His eyes darted again back toward the wall, and I followed his gaze to try to see if I could see or hear anything, but I couldn’t.

“All right, if we’re going to be discussing film theory,” I said, “maybe I should bring one of my old college textbooks next time.”

“Perhaps,” Dr. Mentes said, as if he wasn't really listening.

He stood up, and I stood up, and he walked me to the door. As soon as I walked out, I went back Off-Screen. He shut the door right behind me without so much as saying a word.

I had learned that I was some sort of film director or similar. I had also seen that the movie really hit the ground running, or at least the part of it I saw did.

I also realized that in that entire interaction, I was not even close to being the main character or the focal point of the scene.

That entire interaction was a small bit that centered around Dr. Mentes. And if I knew my psychological collapse trajectory in horror movies well, I knew that something was about to happen to him.

I had to wonder if Carousel would even bother to tell me about it.