The Glimpse Trade (A Silas Sharp Metaphysical Mystery): Chapter 4
Chapter
4 — Notes
The
office of Dr. Calico Verde smells faintly of lavender and paper that has spent
a long time thinking about itself. Not old paper. Not dusty paper. The kind of
paper that has been written on by careful people who enjoy margin space.
Her
office sits above a bookstore that sells astrology charts, dream journals, and
the sort of crystals that promise enlightenment but mostly deliver buyer’s
remorse.
I
do not believe in crystals.
But
I believe in Dr. Verde.
Mostly.
Dr.
Calico Verde did not look up when I entered. She was reading a folder so thick it
could knock a guy out cold if you hit him with it.
“You’re
late,” she said
“I’m
early for tomorrow.” I waited for some semblance of a smile at that wry one-liner,
but she only nodded as if that makes perfect sense. With Verde, it usually did.
“Avery
Bloom,” she said, flipping a page. “You met with her.”
“I
observed her,” I said. “Observation is cheap and quick.”
Dr.
Verde smiles the small, satisfied smile of someone who charges by the hour.
“You
distrust therapy,” she said, finally looking at me. A minor shockwave rumbled
in my body.
“I
distrust anything that claims to improve your life in fifty-minute increments.”
She
tapped the page with a fountain pen.
“There
are inconsistencies.”
“In
her story?”
“In
her language.”
She
turned the folder so I could see the notes. Neat handwriting. Clean margins.
The tidy battlefield of a disciplined mind. I felt her eyes on me as I scanned
the page. I liked feeling her eyes on me.
Several
phrases were underlined.
“In
one version…”
“Earlier
timeline…”
“That’s
not how the tape ran.”
“You
hear it?” she asked.
“I
hear a therapist making money.”
She
ignored that.
“Most
people describe memory emotionally,” she said. “They say things like I
remember, I felt, I thought. Narrative language.”
“What
about influencers?”
“Influencers
describe trauma like they’re reviewing an eye shadow during a livestream.” She
tapped the page again. “She describes experience structurally. Like putting together
a story outline or film treatment.”
I
leaned closer. The smell of Calico’s perfume was as intoxicating as any fine scotch
and packed the same wallop. I focused on the notes. Examined them again like I
was cramming for psych final three minutes before taking it. I didn’t go to
college but if I had, I would’ve been a crammer.
“In
one version.”
“Earlier
timeline.”
“That’s
not how the tape ran.”
“That’s
not therapy language,” I said.
“No,”
Verde agrees. “It’s editing language.”
“Or
playback,” I added.
We
made eye contact. I was entranced but trying not to show it. Outside the
window, a bus passed. The city hums the same indifferent tune it always hums
when people are quietly rearranging reality. Or fighting attraction to one
another.
“She
said something else,” Verde added.
“What’s
that?”
She
flipped to the final page and read aloud.
“Sometimes
I watch it back to see where it went wrong.”
“Watch
what back?” I asked
She
closed the folder.
“That,”
she said calmly, “is the correct question.”
Silence
settled into the office like a well-trained cat.
Finally,
she said, “I believe your influencer is reviewing events.”
“People
review events all the time. Just this morning I reviewed burrito I had last
night with regret and shame.”
“Yes,”
Verde said. She capped her pen slowly and touched it to her lips the way a
chess player does when the game ended three moves ago. “But they usually call
it memory.”
I
looked at the notes again. Three underlined, circled words jumped out. Calico
had written them again in the margin in her amazing penmanship that I was inexplicably
finding sexy.
Running
the tape.
And
just like that, the case stopped being about a missing day.
It
became about a recording.
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