Spasm

                                                        SPASM

The room did not look suitable for this kind of activity. It was musty and damp and the linoleum floor was crowded with cracks that looked like veins. Red veins that belonged to the sleepless eyes of my doctor. He was sitting on a leather sofa which wasn't that leathery anymore on account of it tearing away from the foam like dried crust. The windows were closed. Bolted even, and the room was so dark that I had to fumble around to find my chair. There was the sound of a hissing wind, the kind of sound emitted through a narrow hole in a balloon, but every door was closed. I was locked inside with my doctor and I was feeling less than prepared for that day's session.

'How are you feeling today, Jerome?' he asked me with his usual languid tone of voice.

I'm well, thank you,' I said and I sat on my chair.

'We're trying something different today. You told me about your neck pains...'

'Yes, but I doubt they have anything to do with the trauma.'

'They have everything to do with it, Jerome. Your mother is in your neck. She is the spasm that's bouncing around, causing you the pressure.'

'Excuse me!' I said, quite appalled at what he was saying. He leaned closer and his face was clear now in the light coming from the single bulb above my head. His face was the palest I had ever seen and his lips were as pasty. He took out a lip balm stick from his pocket and applied it to his lips. He licked the lips and then pouted. He craned his neck to the right and smiled at me with a sideways grin like a careful bird, listening to my every breath like a competing whistle.

'You heard me,' he said. 'Your dead mother - not the rotting corpse - the spirit is in your damned neck. It's excruciatingly despicable. She just won't go away.'

I wanted to stand up and walk away but something held me in my seat. 'I loved my mother. I don't blame her. Her suicide was...'

'Comprehensible? Were you that much of a bad boy? Did you push your mother off the edge?'

'How dare you?' I raged. I felt hot and sweat was pricking my pores, searing out like hot sauce. The nausea was starting to creep in again. It started with the legs first. I felt this uncontrollable urge to kick at something. Then violent tremors thrilled my every muscle in both my legs and the tremors moved all the way up my groin. A conflict took place in my stomach and an anger scratched at the inside of my skull. I felt terribly sick.

'Don't you worry,' the doctor said. 'I am going to try out something new, Jerome. I am going to hypnotize you and send you back to that moment. That moment when your mother killed herself. The pain in your neck will subside.'

'No, please,' I urged. But the doctor took out a circular object from his pocket this time. When he shoved it in my view, I could clearly see it was a fob watch.

'Look closely at the second hand,' he said.

And I did. Every move it made and every bounce it made, I felt it in my chest. It was as if my heartbeat was perfectly adjusted to the second hand. I exhibited extraordinary attention to that thin black hand rotating around the middle of the watch. My eyelids felt heavy and that sound of whistling wind made the heavy moisture of the room feel even more soothing. And I let it all droop over my neck and I arched, almost letting my face fall into the lap of my doctor.

'Sleep, Jerome,' the languid voice said. 'Sleep. And see...'

I was in a different room. It was very cold and there was a knocking sound coming from everywhere. My father was knocked out, completely drunk on the sofa. My brother was still at work and I found myself looking out of the window. The moon was coming from two sides. There was its original light in the sky. But then there was its reflection, a glitter echoed in a blade. Outside, in our front yard, my mother was holding a kitchen knife. The front door slammed shut and then opened again. My mother's skirt was flying behind her. The bestial wind made her hair flutter. She turned around and I caught sight of her face as she did mine. Her youth was no longer there. The hollows, where her jowls should have been, made her look like a skeletal thing. She tried to smile at me but it was just a mere jitter in her lips. She raised her hand and I screamed, hoping it would stop her from pushing the blade into herself. But I couldn't move. Something was holding me by the window. Her hand sped down and the tip of the blade sliced through her stomach. The rest of the blade sank deeper, stretching the hole into a barbed mouth of torn flesh and stomach acid. And I dropped to my knees.


'Wake up,' the languid voice said.

'I'm awake,' I said and I was back in the musty room with my doctor.

'Don't you feel sicker?'

I just nodded, unable to understand what this man was trying to do to me. It was as if he wasn't trying to help me at all. It seemed the opposite at that point. He was trying his best to make my state regress into a form of mental illness without a hope of recuperation.

'Good,' he said. 'That's it for today, Jerome. You keep coming now. I think my hypnotism is my greatest idea yet. Do you know why?'

I shook my head and stood up. 'No. Why?'

'Because you get to live that night over and over and over again,' he said with a crazy snicker. 'And that means that I can heal you over and over and over again. And I love my job.'

I walked out of the room and was glad that the whistling was over. My neck certainly felt better and I could turn it and twist it as I pleased without feeling the painful effects of that night. The night I had just relived. But then I realized that the neck pains started a day after my mother's demise. Not that very night. So one more day, I thought to myself. The day after that, the pain came back. The day after that, everything was back to normal. And the day after that, my neck was as stiff as the dead body of my hypnotist.