Doctor Bastard

The first weeks of your therapy went better than expected. You would easily recommend this guy to anybody, unfortunate name withstanding. No one ever seemed to get inside your head so quickly, or with such polite detachment. Deft with words, like a surgeon with his hands. The things he could elicit from you practically without any effort, it was almost disconcerting even as it reassured you. In the first hour you cried. The next time you went back the weight was lifted, and you felt you could get down to some real talking. By the third session that ticking clock went by unheard, and you were surprised, even a little sad, to come to the end of your immersion in that little room.

At some stage you began to really think of him as a surgeon, so clinical and so precise with where he took you, doing light exploratory work on your half-open mind with God knows how many other cases to juggle. You know how they say those experts make it look easy?

And then there's the funny smell coming from his desk some days, and those surgical gloves in the bin over in the corner. At first you thought maybe a surgeon used the room sometimes for whatever reason, but given your read on the guy, maybe your first instincts were right.

You asked him about it once, trying to keep it casual. He said he practises surgery every once in a red moon. Dropped the old joke about leaving his watch in a patient, maybe to play it off. But he didn't really laugh about it like it was a joke - more like when you're remembering a story from your college days or some shit. It's a cautionary tale against the pace of modern life I guess. The guy doesn't know something's wrong until he finally sits down in the quiet of his own home, and he hears it deep inside himself.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

You can picture this guy walking around like the fucking crocodile from Peter Pan. Whoever heard of a surgeon practising therapy in his spare time? Or the other way round?

People talk about a sixth sense. Everything appears to be well, but there's a voice in the back of your head insisting it's wrong. It's paranoia, and it doesn't want you to get better. You've got to keep telling yourself that. Voices in your head and talking to yourself too now. Wasn't this supposed to be going in the opposite direction? This is the best progress you've made in years and you're starting to feel like he's not a real doctor.

And you can tell the anxiety's kicking in again, cause there's that clock on the wall creeping into your consciousness, driving you crazy. It was all going so well, like you were scaling the heights, and then you backslid halfway down the fucking mountain again. You don't need this shit in your head, and now you're thinking that your therapist is leaving shit inside his patients for real. Well why couldn't it be possible? He's doing open surgery on your deepest trauma centres every week, right there under the lights. Who knows what could've slipped in?

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

One day you'll find yourself heading to the twins' room with a kitchen knife in your hand. You'll do a double take, and stare at it in horror. You don't remember anything for the last couple minutes. You're a parent now. You can't be blacking out and listening to commands left rattling inside your head. You start to hope your dreams were dreams. You had to physically stop yourself there. You don't know what the fuck is up.

So you call in to the hospital and they talk to you like you're some fucking kid asking to see Hugh Jass. You're getting madder and panicking now. You swear to them you're not fucking around. You drive for miles on nothing but muscle memory from the times you used to drive there every week, you're fucking shaking so much.

You practically march up to the reception desk. She's looking over those glasses at you like it's the reason she bought them. But her attitude changes when she learns what you're there for. Her face turns grey, and she mutters something about checking with her boss. Then in the quickest time you've ever waited in a place like this, she's back with an administrator saying you'd better leave. Since February they've been getting these calls in from people asking for a Doctor Bastard. No such person works there. There's no one named Bastard in any hospital in the county. It's starting to scare them.

Everything you've read for months there's something in the margins, links or targeted ads, like creatures milling at the limits of your vision, all about surgical malpractice. Lawyers. Tales. Stories about people with live animals and infant forelimbs sewn up inside them. Somebody was admitted down in Kettering. They found a baby's arm was pressing on his lungs. Another lady had a mother rat inside of her deliver a litter. She came in shitting blood from what they'd gnawed out from inside of her.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...

Every night you sleep later and later. Every corner of your room there's someone's shadow. In your dreams a man in a white coat stands there, in your kitchen, in your home, watching you, smiling. You don't want to sleep. You won't go to the twins's room. You hear them crying in the night and pull your knees up like you don't trust your feet not to go. Everything's plastic in your kitchen now. You eat with sporks and shit. Takeout every night you can get it, and he's still at that conference in Chicago, totally unaware. You want to turn yourself in, have someone open you up, take off the top of that head. Maybe you'll do it yourself. You don't know what the fuck you'll find in there. Maybe no one should be exposed to it. Doctor Bastard? Was he a symptom of this madness? Or did something ancient as fuck find a new way to fuck with the sad world? There's a wailing from the room you never step foot in, down that corridor you walked every day before you ever thought to open up your mind.