California Pacific

Chapter 2
Part Two

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Chapter Description: Chapters Six and Seven.

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CHAPTER SIX

APRIL 14TH, 2060

PSYCHIATRICS, CALIFORNIA PACIFIC_

“Shouldn’t the psychologist I had be doing this?”

Scott sat upright on a couch, facing the heavy wooden desk that had many times been manned by Dr. Elias Farnham, a nationally-celebrated psychologist who specialized in “survivor types.”

At current, the desk was occupied by Dr. Carroll.

“You would think so,” she conceded, “but this particular brand of hypnosis is most effective when it’s administered by somebody who has a constant and active role in the rehabilitation of the patient. Since I know your physical attributes and capabilities more intimately than Dr. Farnham does, my conduction of the sessions will hasten things along.”

“And you’re sure this’ll get rid of my nightmares?” Scott asked. “Even once a month is too often for those things.”

Carroll grinned. “I guarantee it. But we must be patient. Vigilant. Now, go ahead and lie down.”

Scott, dressed in street clothes Dr. Carroll had purchased for him -- a green polo shirt, blue jeans, underwear, shoes, and socks -- stretched out on the three-paneled couch and nestled the back of his head against a pair of plush pillows. He rubbed the inside of his left elbow, where Carroll had recently injected him with a colorless fluid, with his right hand. She had explained that it was a sedative meant to relax Scott and make him more receptive to the hypnosis. Carroll had taken extra care to dance around the word “suggestible.”

“Now, Scott, I want you to close your eyes and count backwards from ten. Slowly.” Carroll engaged a small digital audio recorder she had placed upright upon the surface of the desk.

The young man returned his arms to his sides, allowed his eyes to flutter shut, and began. “Ten... nine... eight...” Scott was impressed, if not a little shocked, that a sudden wave of mental exhaustion accompanied by physical drowsiness crashed over him with such completeness. “...seven... ...six... ... ...five...” He yawned. “.....four.....”

Silence.

“Scott? Scott, are you awake?”

“Yeah.”

“You didn’t finish counting.”

He squirmed a bit. “I know.”

“Why didn’t you finish counting?”

“Got stuck.”

Dr. Carroll smiled. She was in.

“Alright, Scott, now I need you to listen very carefully to me. I am going to slowly and clearly recite a list of facts to you. Do you understand what a ‘fact’ is, Scott?”

“It’s an accur... uh... it’s a true thing about something.”

“Very good. Your job is to repeat them back to me. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yeah.” Scott yawned again. His eyes were still shut.

Carroll cleared her throat. “It is Wednesday, April 14th, 2060.”

“It is Wednesday, April 14th, 2060.” Scott was not speaking in the stereotypical monotone of the suggestible; he merely ended his sentence by dipping the timbre of his voice, as would a person going on 48 hours without sleep.

Carroll checked off a box on a sheet of paper she had affixed to her clipboard. “The President of the United States is Marlene Yu.”

“The President of the United States is Marlene Yu.”

The doctor checked off another box. “In physical therapy, if I ask you to do something, you will do it.”

Scott affirmed the statement.

Check. “During our sessions here, if I tell you a fact about yourself, you will learn it.”

Scott affirmed the statement.

Dr. Carroll continued marking her paper. “Though you’re 27 years old, you still see yourself as a young teenager, socially sensitive and incidentally vulgar.”

Scott grinned in spite of himself. As he reiterated Carroll’s “fact” back to her, he indeed felt himself become looser, relieved by the profound sensation that not nearly as much was expected of him as he had thought.

Carroll looked up from her clipboard. “And you’re a thumbsucker.”

Scott unconsciously swallowed the lump in his throat. “I’m a thumbsucker.”

For the next handful of minutes, Dr. Carroll continued to implant newly-factual information into Scott’s subconscious, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, allowing him time to repeat the facts, assert them, and let them sink in before moving on.

“Whenever you suck your thumb, an overwhelming feeling of calmness will wash over you. You don’t have any modesty about doing it in front of other people. But, if you end up sucking your thumb in front of somebody, you’ll feel vulnerable and exposed, as if you’ve just revealed a deeply personal secret, and you’ll react the same way most little boys do to that sense of vulnerability... you’ll cover your crotch with your free hand.”

“...I’ll cover my crotch with my free hand.” Scott wasn’t reacting, one way or another, to the words he was chiseling onto his own brain. Carroll considered that to be extremely promising.

“Now, when I say your name, you will leave this trance. You will not consciously recall any of what transpired here. You will remain groggy enough to sleep, and you will ask me to walk you back to your room and put you to bed.”

“...and put me to bed,” Scott peeped. He was already hurtling inexorably towards slumber as it was.

“Scott.”

The young man opened his eyes.

“How do you feel?” asked Dr. Carroll.

“Exhausted,” Scott replied, capping off the word with another yawn. He sat up and blinked, his eyelids heavy. “So are the nightmares gone?”

Carroll chuckled. “All in time, Mr. Danvers. As for this session, I think we’re finished.” The doctor reached over and switched off the digital audio recorder.

Scott stood up. Drowsily, he glanced about the room, looking confused.

“Something the matter?” asked Carroll.

“Uh...” The young man looked partially sure of himself, but not nearly enough to take any steps. “Could you, um, walk me back to my room, please?”

Carroll set down her clipboard and pen and stood up. “Of course. That’s what I’m here for.” She hooked her right arm through the dazed and dizzy Scott’s left, and, carefully and at a deliberate pace, the pair made their way back to the wing in which Scott was staying, and then to his assigned room. He shared it with an 18-year-old named Luke, who was recovering from a low-speed motorcycle accident that, fortunately, cracked the prudent boy’s helmet instead of his skull.

Scott stood next to his hospital bed. It had already been elevated, just the way he liked it. Dr. Carroll drew the hanging shade that separated a sleeping Luke’s half of the room from Scott’s. They faced one another for a few beats while the furiously-blushing 27-year-old got up the nerve to expel the words he knew were coming.

“Can you please put me to bed?” Scott burned with shame.

“Sure,” Carroll replied, “but you don’t intend on getting a good night’s sleep baking in those street clothes, do you?”

Scott squirmed in his sneakers. “I suppose not.” A mild game of brinksmanship ensued wherein the young man remained motionless, waiting pointedly for the woman doctor to grant him the 20 seconds or so of privacy he would require to slip under the bedcovers... but Carroll, too, was stationary, adopting the alert demeanor of a caretaker whose responsibility it was to ensure that her drowsy charge didn’t take a tumble and consign himself to another several days of painkillers and sedatives.

His will faded rapidly. Feeling moments away from unconsciousness, Scott sighed and pulled his shirt up over his head, revealing a moderately-toned and masculine torso that had recovered well from an excruciating sunburn. Scott’s shoes and socks followed, and the tile floor of the hospital room greeted the soles of his feet with a refreshing coolness. Finally -- driven by neither conscious desire nor pragmatism, but by a force from deep within that imperceptibly handled him like a marionette -- Scott unzipped his jeans and divested himself of them, leaving him standing before the amused physician in nothing but a pair of red boxer-briefs that left little to the imagination.

Scott yawned loudly, his jaw hanging wide such that the first couple words of his next sentence were unintelligible. “...get a gown to wear or something?”

“What... get almost completely undressed in hopes of a restful sleep, just to put on a billowy, uncomfortable sheet of fabric?” Carroll shook her head, took Scott by the hand, and began to guide the young man onto his bed and beneath its covers. “Don’t worry about that, hon. You’re primarily here for counseling and convenience. What you need now is the kind of normal night’s rest you’ve come to expect in your own home.”

Scott nodded, his mind clouding over with distance. He wriggled inside the pocket formed by his bedclothes. Dr. Carroll waited for Scott’s heavy eyelids to drop shut and stay there before leaning over the bedrail and planting a gentle kiss upon his forehead.

“Goodnight, my baby,” she whispered. The angelic face beneath her didn’t react or move, outside of breathing hollowly with slumber. Its image stayed with her, though, long after she had left the room and returned to her office.

Scott, meanwhile, had turned onto his side, pushed his thumb between his lips, and began to suck. His sleep was mercifully dreamless.

CHAPTER SEVEN

APRIL 15TH, 2060

MECHANICAL DIAGNOSIS AND THERAPY, CALIFORNIA PACIFIC_

“So you slept alright?” asked Dr. Carroll, who sat on a folding chair while Scott splayed himself out on the floor and performed simple stretches in preparation for his physical therapy.

“I slept fine,” he replied, without the usual elaboration or exuberance. He had, in fact, enjoyed the most rejuvenating sleep since before he had set out to sea.

However, he was troubled.

The first thing that had ignited Scott’s concern upon his return to the waking world was the state of his left thumb: sopping, wrinkled, and still being nursed upon, bathed by a tongue and salivary glands that worked with infantile efficiency. Drool had liberated itself from the side of Scott’s overactive mouth and pooled onto the pillowcase beneath his cheek.

He greeted the morning sun, blinking and bleary-eyed, with an intense feeling of shame. Scott hadn’t sucked his thumb since he was five years old, and even then, he had at least made the conscious decision to do so.

But he didn’t stop. He didn’t jerk his thumb out of his mouth in shock or disgust. Instead, he redoubled the intensity of his oral ministrations, loosing a bashful whine of relief when he acknowledged that the mere act of thumbsucking had a recursive attenuating effect on his sense of shame-- it made him feel calm, at peace, and reassured that there was nothing about which to worry.

His thumb was in his mouth when he climbed out of bed. It was in his mouth when he gathered up his clothes and headed towards the hospital room’s single bathroom. And it was in his mouth when, mostly naked and still drowsy, he crossed the line of sight of Luke, who was wide awake and whose presence Scott had been too near sleep to register the previous evening.

The laughter caused Scott to stop stone-cold in his tracks.

“What the hell are you doing, man?” chuckled the teenager, a half-eaten bagel and a cup of orange juice pushed off to his side. It was later than Scott had thought. And Luke, who continued to laugh, was less concerned with social etiquette and more enraptured by the novelty of seeing a man nearly a decade his senior sucking his thumb. “You ‘special’ or somethin’?”

More embarrassed than he could recall ever being, Scott -- who knew that, if he were to extract his thumb from his mouth at that moment, he would probably start crying -- simply dropped his gathered clothes to the floor and clutched fearfully at his penis through his underwear.

To his horror, Scott realized that he was thinking with all the pathological insecurity of a 14-year-old, and behaving younger still. He knew that, through no intention of his own, he had blown his one shot at being seen as “cool” by the 18-year-old in the other bed. What would his friends say if Luke went around and told everybody? What if it got to the internet? Scott could picture groups of his female co-workers, five or six strong, gathered around holomonitors and reading in exacting detail all about how he was nothing more than a nervous, impotent thumbsucker. Their laughter rang inside his head as Luke’s echoed through his ears. And all Scott could bring himself to do in response to the sudden onslaught of emotional stimuli was knead his genitals and whine like a child.

“I’ve had better mornings, though,” he finally offered to Dr. Carroll.

“Well, you’ll feel better after you get a little exercise. Today we’re going to try something a little new-- something intended to strengthen your thigh muscles and improve the dexterity of your feet. See this black lane?”

Scott got to his feet and took note of to what Carroll was referring. A long strip of ebony vinyl, 18 inches wide, was laid across the floor where the young man had learned to walk again as he gradually regained his body mass.

“You just want me to walk across it?”

“Not as such,” replied Carroll. “The idea here is to walk down the lane with your legs straddling it-- so that your feet don’t touch the vinyl itself. You can take it slow if you want. Just try to remain as straight-postured as possible. Stretch out your arms for balance if you have to.”

“That doesn’t sound very useful at all,” Scott opined.

“I’m asking you to do it.”

In moments, Scott was doing it. He felt singularly ridiculous keeping his feet spread apart for no apparent reason, and he felt doubly so when he noticed himself extending his arms like a pair of airplane wings. They stabilized him during his journey, but Scott couldn’t help but take himself out of his body and picture the spectacle he was putting on... a 27-year-old, toddling like a baby just learning to walk, with no justification apart from a simple directive he had felt no compulsion to debate, let alone disobey.

But the exercise made perfect sense to Dr. Carroll. She knew that it was only a matter of time before it became Scott’s preferred method of locomotion.

And that it was in his best interest to begin practicing now, before he no longer had a choice in the matter.

. . . to be continued . . .

 

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