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Copyright © 2010 Ernest Bloom.

"And here we are again, Mr. Palmer," his sissy-Shrink said, his high-pitched voice strangely out of kilter with his long and limber frame. He inserted his key and pushed open the door. "The Greek Theatre." Reaching inside to palm the light panel he led the way in, Mason following behind.

The room, located in an anonymous suite forty floors above the New York hustle and bedlam, was unchanged. Uniformly pale, milky white light seemingly emanated from the enclosure itself. There were no corners, the round, cylindrical wall curving into gently rounded ceiling and floor. It was a muted luminescent egg of a room whose only visible features were the door, also white with a plain white knob, and the white light switch, and the small white leather sofa in the center of the floor.

This was ‑‑ what? The fifth, or sixth, time he'd been here.

He recalled his Shrink's faltering efforts at explanation several weeks ago.

"Consider the human experience in terms of phenomenology," the boy-man had lectured him. "The first-person I-consciousness is trapped inside a physical, biological body, bounded by its skin and pinched off from all the rest of the universe, isolated and alone. Perception and memory are all we have to tell us what is out there. Contrary to common belief, our consciousness does not directly experience external objects, but only perceptions and memories of external objects. In fact, we have no objective way of knowing what, if anything, really does exist out there. Our real-time experience of the world is no more than a continuous stream of incoming data, modulated waves propagating through our sensory organs, electrochemical impulses racing along networks of neurons intricately wired through pulpy flesh. Holographic analysis merely seeks to control those same vast internal neural networks, to tap into them and reassemble memories in new ways, in vivid ways that allow one to penetrate to the heart of symbolic meaning."

That had been two months ago. Now, today, his Shrink cleared his throat.

"I'm a little excited about today's session, I must admit, Mr. Palmer. The program downloaded a new upgrade last night. Improved tactility binding, and a few other chinks sealed. I scanned through the documentation this morning, but I haven't read it all yet. Looks promising. I'm hoping for a more authentic therapeutic session. You'll be my first client to try it out."

"Your first guinea pig," he said.

His Shrink chuckled and lightly patted him on the back.

"I'm sure it will be just fine. The experience should be more seamless than ever."

Mason frowned disapprovingly at the other man, clad in his usual jeans and beige turtleneck and fusty old gray plaid sport coat. He wore a trim brown goatee, but his neck underneath never seemed quite cleanly shaven. His beard was a continuing work in progress. His Shrink was young, mid-thirtyish, tall and lanky, with a thick shock of unkempt brown hair and closely-spaced black eyes that reminded him of Edgar Allan Poe. Whenever Mason looked at him, those dark eyes darted away and the man grinned nervously. If, as Mason suspected, his Shrink spent his off-hours alone in this room, it wasn't doing him any good. He was not a psychiatrist but a lay analyst, as he had made clear at their very first meeting. What that meant, Mason thought, was that he was a techy-geek PhD who liked to fiddle around with the Lancebourg Device, but he required a clientele to justify his grant. This was of no concern to Mason, who was not attending these sessions so his Shrink could get inside his head. He cared nothing about that. If he were progressing at all through his emotional issues, his Shrink's role beyond facilitator had been immaterial.

No. It was the magic of the machine that intrigued Mason.

"What we try to do here," his Shrink had told him during that first meeting, "is to help you come to terms with your personal human relationships in an absolutely controlled and psychologically safe setting. We're not about Freudian mother complexes or Jungian archetypes or any of that theoretical claptrap. Those methods may have their merits, but this is the twenty-first century, and who has time for all that dilly-dallying? Besides, and in all fairness, what insurance company should be expected to reimburse it? None. Exactly. In modern times we expect and deserve and demand timely returns on our investments, and that's precisely what holographic analysis delivers."

The man had blabbed away while Mason, nodding, tuned him out. It was mere formality of the orientation session. Naturally he would never have sought out this kind of experimental therapy without first conducting a good deal of research on his own.

He probably understood the theory of holographic analysis at least as well as his Shrink did. The Lancebourg Device was essentially a triple fusion of a giant superconducting positron emission tomography scanner wired up to a supercomputer and the proprietary soul of the device, an array of GyBMaLLEs. Concealed behind the room's white walls, these Gyro-Balanced Magnetic Laser Lithographic Engravers targeted the patient's optic and auditory cortices with extraordinary accuracy and precision. According to the user's manual, which Mason had downloaded and assiduously scrutinized, holographic analysis allowed the patient to conjure up a profoundly vivid mental reconstruction of a person with whom he had a history of inter-social dysfunction. These realistic reconstructions evolved and improved over time, and were subject to exquisite control: stop, rewind, freeze-frame, replay, and so forth. Under the careful supervision of a mental health professional, remarkable revelations involving a patient's heretofore mental sparring partner could be achieved. Understanding followed. The insights gained could be applied directly in actual human-to-human interaction or, if the vexing relationship under analysis had been terminated, then the patient could at least resolve outstanding trauma and move forward down his own life-path ‑‑ or so the manual averred.

The phenomenon of face recognition was illustrative. It was unnecessary to dredge up a perfect image of a person from the vaults of memory as though it were a frozen icon in one's mind. Memories were not solid objects like photographs but manipulated, representative symbols. The Lancebourg Device did not function in discrete terms because the human mind did not deal in static chunks of information, but instead juggled relationships between scattered memory fragments. You recalled certain general features, and then the mind built upon this base-memory, adding details, refining, rejecting what was inadequate, enhancing smaller details, increasing resolution, all without you knowing what your brain was doing. The Lancebourg Device piggybacked onto that natural process and brought it into sharper, conscious focus.

Holographic analysis was about feedback: PET scan to GyBMaLLEs to PET scan to GyBMaLLEs. Read/write/read/write, with memory amplification. Mason had grasped this immediately.

"Well, you know the drill. Have a seat on the couch, Mr. Palmer, and in a few minutes we'll begin." His Shrink nodded and turned, pulled the door closed behind him. A soft thump pulsed through the room with a slight feeling of pressure on his eardrums, and the outline of the door disappeared into the ubiquitous white on white.

Mason sat down. He leaned his head back.

He hadn't needed his pretentious, prissy Shrink to try to impress him with theories of phenomenology. He'd learned all he needed to know about that from James Joyce. It occurred to him then that maybe that was all Ulysses was about. Space, and movement through space in time. Motion. Changing velocities. ds/dt. Multiple points of view of external phenomena. A mild version of relativity, even. Parallax. Perception and memory. Even Leopold Bloom's cat, he thought. Was that the significance of that scene, with old Bloom wondering how a cat perceives the world? Was clever Joyce signaling in that scene the whole point of his massive dismantling of perceived objects and their relationships during a single day? Networks of sparking neurons negotiating the lightless interior of a cat. . . .

"Okay, Mr. Palmer," came his Shrink's disembodied voice from the surrounding white globe, "we'll begin in a few moments. Try to calm your mind. Clear away all thoughts, and focus on the pattern before you."

The room dimmed around him, and presently a ruby-red design appeared floating in the air a few feet before his eyes, a thin geometrical drawing like the petals of a daisy. He focused his attention on it. It served as a mandala to draw his awareness to a point and forestall other random thoughts and visions.

"Very good, Mr. Palmer," his Shrink's voice said. "Stay focused."

He began to sense the familiar field accruing around him. It was not a tingling sensation, but a boosting of consciousness and a clarification of the thinking process, as if gadfly trivia was being subtracted away, filtered out. It was a singular sensation, like being high and powerful.

"Okay. We've been working through your relationship with your girlfriend--"

"Ex-girlfriend."

"Yes, of course. Sylvia. Do you think you can​​. . . .​​"

It was routine now, requiring little effort on his part. He thought of her, and the image immediately began to manifest, life-size, in the air before him, replacing the mandala daisy. At first she was a hazy, milky ghost floating in the air, but his mind had learned how to surrender itself to the feedback process, and quickly the vague, fuzzy edges began to attain sharper focus. The noise started, too, the incessant whining, accusatory tone, although as yet he could not hear what she was complaining about; still, the intonations and inflections were immediately recognizable to him. The processes continued to its endpoint, and in no more than fifteen seconds a ghostly-white Sylvia-specter stood before him, semi-transparent, obviously wildly furious as ever, shaking her finger in his face, and he softly said the magic word: "Freeze," and she froze to stillness, her eyes glaring at him and her mouth wide open in mid-harangue. He marveled at the accuracy of the ghost-image, and as he always did, he brushed his hand through the apparition, testing it. His hand passed through it, feeling nothing, sensing no ectoplasmic chill. But the frozen image remained.

"That's fine, Mr. Palmer," his Shrink's voice said.

"I still can't believe I can freeze her like that," he said. "If I'd been able to do this in real life, it would have made everything a lot easier."

"Real life isn't subject to holographic control. The idea is to take what you learn here in the discontinuously-controlled environment and apply those lessons in continuously unfolding reality."

"Yes, yes. . . .​​​​"

But he didn't care about the psychobabble theory that his Shrink was trying to sell. He'd never cared about trying to better understand the relationship he'd had with Sylvia ‑‑ he'd understood it all too well. What he'd always wanted was only to do this: to freeze her in situ, not to have a deeper understanding with her, not to engage in meaningful conversation or give and take. All he had really wanted was to just make her finally shut up. And although she was only a ghost, a second-rate approximation of Sylvia-in-the-flesh, it was satisfying to see her at last frozen this way, locked inside her own madness, which was not raining down on him.

It was too bad she was a raging lunatic, he thought, because she did have certain appealing qualities; it was just that the madness and selfishness had overcome and obviated them all. He wished that it had been possible to cut away her uncontrollable fury and release the sane human he had known early in their relationship, who must still be cowering in there somewhere deep in her neurotic mind. But it was too late for that now, even had it been possible. Even restored to her earlier sanity, he would not want her now. He thought of a number of women he had known over many years, and he wished it were possible to take various appealing qualities from each of them, and to discard what was less desirable, and to reassemble all these best components into a brand new individual, one balanced, and bright, and lovely, and with a mind truly complementary to his own.

"I'm going to activate the new elements of the program," his Shrink said, and suddenly everything commenced to change.

It began with color. Sylvia's white ghost slowly began to take on color. The change, hesitant at first, was most apparent in her clothing. As the feedback-driven process advanced it picked up speed, the colors growing brighter and more fully saturated. The effect spread to her flesh, the finger in his face, and her eyes and face and hair beyond. As the intensity and subtlety of the shading became more perfect he realized that the transparent quality of the figure was falling away. He was astonished. She now looked like her own true, three-dimensional self, and at first he felt a sense of shock and trepidation, because it seemed that somehow the real Sylvia had been teleported inside the room. But she did not move; she remained fixed, motionless, exactly as he had frozen her moments before. The startling process of transformation came to an end. Somewhat fearfully, he reached his hand up to try to touch her finger in his face. He jerked his hand away.

It was real; at least, it felt real. Authentic Sylvia-flesh.

"Holy crap!" his Shrink's voice said.

Mason remembered the man had mumbled something earlier about improved tactility binding. Well, he thought, the upgrade had definitely achieved that. The GyBMaLLEs must have acquired substantially improved access to the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex. He wondered what other enhancements came with this update.

"Unfreeze," he said, and immediately Sylvia's tirade resumed where it had left off, only now she was more intimidating with a new physical dimension. He reached up toward her mouth and ran his fingers back and forth over her rampaging lips, feeling her stiffen in surprise. But to his surprise he saw that her lips had smeared. It was as if she had become a three-dimensional finger-painting, and now her mouth was smudged in a blur, and she was physically unable to talk. "Freeze," he said, and again she froze, and he considered what he had done.

"What have you done?" his Shrink howled.

He could control the feedback loop in a way he had not suspected before. He did not have to rely exclusively on memory. It could be a more creative process. He considered it for only a brief moment before setting to work.

He focused on the women he had been remembering earlier. Read/write/read/write, he thought. Feedback. Using the frozen-Sylvia as the starting template, like a blob of clay on a potter's wheel, he began imagining parts and pieces here and there removed, reformed, remade. And as he did so, the image before him began to change.

"What are you doing, Mason?" his now frantic Shrink demanded.

"Be quiet," he whispered, continuing with the sculpting process.

"I'm coming in there," his Shrink said.

"No," Mason said, "you're gone." And he imagined his Shrink out of the building and miles away, standing alone in the middle of a bleak desert in Utah​​. . . .​​

Now he could take his time.

He spent the rest of the day perfecting this new woman, this amalgam containing elements he had found attractive and charming in dozens of other women, adding other elements he had known only in his own imagination. Height: half an inch shorter than he; hair: long black ringlets; eyes: emerald green; measurements: 35"-23"-34"; legs: long, like so-and-so's; lips: thin, but well-defined, like so-and-so's; earrings: short silver semi-circles; skirt: white, an inch below the knee; blouse: black and white checks. . . .​​​​and so on. The woman who emerged resembled them all in certain ways, but none of them completely.

Her psychological composition was the most difficult part of the task. The last thing he wanted was a man's mind in a woman's body, but what could he possibly know about a woman's mind? So he started with Sylvia's mind, but now he was able to cut away her uncontrollable hostility. He stripped away her memories and gave her a brand new history, boosted her intelligence and wisdom, made her a happier creature less threatened by a world she barely understood, again incorporating insights and beguiling effects he had gained from other women over the years. Of course she required a new vocal register, and brand new speech mannerisms. . . .​​​​

When he was finished he leaned back on the sofa admiring his handiwork. She had everything but a name. Eve being too obvious, he decided she should be​​. . . .​​​​hmm​. . . .​​Isabelle. And Isabelle she was.

Then he looked around the room. It wouldn't do to lose access to the Lancebourg Device. It could come in handy in the future. So he decided that Isabelle was his new Shrink. And that they had fallen in love. And that they need not live in the New York rat race any longer.

"Unfreeze," he said.

She came to life and smiled at him. Her eyes were twinkling.

"Your therapy has been successful, Mr. Palmer," she said. "You're cured."

He smiled back as he stood up.

"Call me Mason. And if I'm cured, then we need no longer worry about rigorously adhering to an ethical doctor-patient relationship, right?"

"I suppose you're right. . . .Mason."

"In that case, let's get dinner and drinks. I'm buying."

"That sounds just fine," she said.

She opened the door and the usual thump of pressure equalization followed. They moved out onto the iron-railed walk behind the building. The lush green trees of Savannah's Emmet Park were spread all around them in the late afternoon twilight. He put his hand in hers and they walked down to the smooth cobblestones at street-level, making for the riverfront. He inhaled the clean air deeply and felt the soft quiet settling in as she leaned into him.

For the first time in months, he felt completely relaxed.

The End.