An Injury to One is an Injury to All?

Jackie dare not reveal to her client that she’d seen the bizarre scene that had unfolded in her front yard: a client beating up a therapist’s boyfriend. Tempted as she was, Jackie knew she couldn’t directly ask Lola why she had assaulted Buck on her front lawn. She couldn’t even ask Lola how she knew Buck. Jackie was bound by a professional oath of confidentiality, an oath that imposed a kind of “straightjacket” on Jackie’s curiosity.   

As Lola entered Jackie’s office and assumed her customary spot in the analysand’s chair, all Jackie knew she could say to her bellicose client was, “So, tell me a bit about how you’ve been feeling, since the last time we met.”

A Lot On Her Mind

Richard drove Lola home in silence.  He knew something was wrong.  She sat in the back seat of his limousine, fondling her purse like it was a rosary.  As she distractedly looked out the limo’s window, her delicate fingers worried her handbag’s little leather straps into a knot.  Richard thought it best that he not ask her any more questions.

As he pulled the lumbering black car up to the front of Lola’s apartment building,  Richard  silently wondered about why Lola hadn’t renewed her gun permit?  Maybe she just forgot that she owned a gun?   Lola seemed to have an awful lot on her mind, these days.

The Whole Truth

As Richard pulled his limo up to the front of the Santa Monica police station, Lola pantomimed a tiny wave, and seemed simultaneously to float and to trudge down the station’s white steps. Opening the back passenger door, she slipped across the broad back seat, directly behind her chauffeur boyfriend and steeled herself for Richard’s unavoidable questions.

Richard turned down “The Killers,” whose noisy angst blared from the car’s radio, and asked “What are you doing here? Were you arrested, or something?”

Lola replied through the limousine’s half-lowered dividing glass, “They discovered that the permit to my handgun expired, and picked me up to ask a few silly questions.”

To avoid Richards puzzled gaze, Lola immediately turned her head to look down Olympic. It wasn’t a lie exactly, it just wasn’t a court would say was “the whole truth.”

Tasteless

Lola’s emotions tore at her, as if they were switchblades wrested from her by an unknown gang of assailants, then used to flay her. Empty as a ghost's tongue, she was at a total loss for words.


Maybe I’m not feeling ANYTHING?


Overhead, the sky’s blue gray haze floated like cigarette smoke exhaled in a daytime cocktail lounge.


Tell the truth Lola, she chided herself.


I want an ice cream...........ANY flavor at all, will do.

Texting: a Vow of Silence

As the breeze shuffled in from the Pacific, Lola paused for a moment on the precinct station’s white stone, front steps. Her altercation with Buck, and the ensuing encounter with the police, left her feeling vacant as a lost glove.

Feeling now like she never wanted to speak to anyone ever again—Buck, Jackie, even Richard---Lola wondered if she could actually endure a self-imposed vow of silence? She reached into her hand bag, and gingerly removed her cell phone.

I’ll just text Richard to ask him to pick me up and drive me home.Texting, she reassured herself, MUST be exempt from a vow of silence.

Brand New Refrigerator

Lola often had difficulty distinguishing the inside from the outside. Where did her self “end” and others—in this case, Buck--- “begin”? Had she been hitting him, or had he been hitting her? She looked down at her blouse and it was white and clean as a bleached cumulus cloud—no blood, no grass stains. She didn’t feel any pain. Buck, on the other hand, looked like he had been attacked with a red paint ball gun—his shirt splashed and speckled with blood---maybe his own?

Released in her own custody, and now standing outside the Santa Monica Police station, Lola suddenly felt cold and vacant as a brand new refrigerator—all its shelves and drawers stark white and completely empty. The persistent low-pitched electrical hum in her head iced her scattered thoughts to a glacial standstill.

Superman: Suicide or Murder?

After Lola left Jackie’s home office, Jackie realized she didn’t have another client until 3:00 PM, so she sauntered from her office into her kitchen, fixed herself a cup of mint tea, and wandered into her surprisingly dark, mid-day living room. Her mind, surprisingly blank—she often “went blank” after a therapy session with Lola--Jackie sipped her tea and stared out of her living room’s large picture window, where she expected to see nothing pictured, but the warm, lazy stillness of her quiet Melrose neighborhood. Instead, she was startled by the sight of two hulking LA cops standing like rooted oaks on her front lawn, Buck barely on his feet as he teetered in a state of beaten dishevelment, and a furious Lola, animatedly pleading with the two, stone-faced officers.

Although Jackie could see that her client and her boyfriend were both in the custody of the Police, she reflexively refrained from running out of her front door to confront the two cops. Instead, she took a deep, calming breath (just as she so often implored her clients to do in moments of distress), and told herself to simply watch, simply observe, the bizarre scene that was unfolding in her front yard. As she did, a peculiar thought popped into Jackie’s mind: Hadn’t George Reeves, the actor who, in the 1950s, played Superman on TV, committed suicide after his career ended? Or had he been murdered?