01.2

GUMDROPS IN THE
THUNDER DOME

by Jared Roehrig

Every week I am visited by a small creature who insists on being pelted with pillows. We drop the crayons and paper, leave the art room, and take up our weapons. Talk simply won’t do. These orders come as no surprise to me anymore, and I resist only to my greatest peril. Part of me wants to tell the insistent nine-year-old before me, that the room is occupied by very important people, or that they are doing construction in there, anything to get me out of feeling like I am bad at my job, coloring outside the lines of acceptable practice. What kind of a therapist am I, spending an hour getting paid for throwing pillows at a child? But it’s no use, and I find that surrendering to the untamed imagination is the easiest path, that I must keep myself openly playful to the possibility of receiving the cryptic communication of spirit. I must remember that somewhere in that tangle of uncombed hair and flurry of movement, that flair for dictatorship and bloodlust, that nonstop death drive of sugar and cartwheels is a desire to be experienced on its own terms.

It takes me a while to warm up, to switch gears from talking about prolonged grief or how a client’s mother didn’t try nearly hard enough. I accept that for an hour, I have an entirely different job. It’s no longer a job even, but a hunt. I am tracking an unknowable force through the forest, interpreting a broken branch or the trampled carapace of fruit as an emotional resonance that is never directly offered, all the while keeping myself camouflaged in silliness. For an hour my job is to follow the scent of an elusive spirit, one who has eaten the hearts of her parents’ cattle and befouled their crops, a veritable Disney version of El Chupacabra.

By now, we both know the routine. We fan out to opposite sides of the room, never crossing an imaginary boundary line. There are nine pillows and one by one I take aim at the creature darting around excitedly. If she is hit, she loses a life. But thanks to her ongoing flexibility with the rules, she never really gets hit, never really loses a life, because this unstoppable force has internalized the cheat codes. She has discovered, in the magical time of after-school nonsense, what philosophers have mulled over for centuries - some things can’t be killed.After 6 rounds of dodging pillows, she grants both her and myself an additional power. Recently I gained the ability to throw three pillows at once, and another time I was able to cross into her area. She suggested the following time that I try to use the pillows like smashers and crush her between

them. This gave her the chance to show off her splits and roll away unscathed. The powers she gains are equally devastating. She can hypnotize me by song, and other times she snaps her fingers and turns me blind. There is nothing she likes better than to be able to freeze an adult in their tracks. Sometimes she gives me a magic wand only to say that it doesn’t work when I use it. I pretend-sulk in the corner, but sooner or later, she orders me back to our game, as the clock is ticking after all, and she doesn’t want to go home, no, not at all, because that would mean more rules, more chores, more homework, her mom always telling her to do this and do that, her dad moving too quickly through the house, shouting from room to room to mom the way ambulances echo through city streets.

“Bury me,” has been a common wish as time wanes. It seems then, that death has come after all. Like dusk descending through the trees, the creature has come to accept that even deities must rest. She orders me to put the pillows on top of her. I deliver a eulogy, dredging up all the nice things I knew about her, leaving out the way she farts unexpectedly and laughs at me, or how she once dropped sand in my hair or how she terrorizes the waiting room with a gusto reserved for Marvel villains. This eulogized version settles her into her goodness, seals the best parts of her humanity to her. Now she is ready to go into the outer world having faced her own not-so-bad disintegration, emerging stronger than ever. She can remember who she is amidst her two bulky, exhausted parents who are always telling her to do something. And like a butterfly in her chrysalis, the creature springs out of her cocoon, sweaty and free, ready for new life.

It seems even the waiting room undergoes its own transformation. She hugs her mother, who for once puts her iPhone down, takes a longer than usual beat to collect herself, ,confirms next week and thanks me in passing. She takes the little beast in her hand, ready anew to try to find some kind of life-force in the remaining sheep on the farm. I can see the flicker of light in her eyes. But her mother is so tired. There are so few sheep left, such little vitality. And the winters of our youth are getting more and more slippery. Maybe there is something going around which may force us to care for our animals differently. Perhaps we will gain our good sleep once again if we give them a new kind of water, a new kind of light, if only we listened long enough to learn the source.