The Visible Man Read Online Free Page B

with when this process starts to accelerate. Don’t overthink what’s happening here, Vicky. I am not a swamp monster, Vicky. I’m not an invisible man. I’m not a vampire, and I’m not God. I’m just an incredibly interesting person. Good night, Vicky.”

The First Meaningful Phone Call
     
    [After consultation with Dr. Jane Dolanagra, my own therapist and academic mentor, I concluded that the conditions Y ____ proposed in his message were not as problematic as my gut reaction indicated. What was the risk? Why not allow Y ____ to freely say whatever it is he wants me to know? Isn’t the entire purpose of therapy to make the client comfortable? To put the client in whatever position makes them most willing to become emotionally vulnerable? To get them to talk on their terms, so that he or she can eventually have those same kinds of conversations inside their own head? That was my thinking at the time. Obviously, I’m less comfortable with that position now. But Dolanagra and I both postulated that—if Y ____ was indeed as intelligent as I believed—he might naturally gravitate toward the same platform I would have pushed him toward .
    Some context: After I opened our April 11 call by saying, “The floor is yours,” Y ____ lectured nonstop for forty-three minutes, at which point I informed him that less than two minutes remained in our session. This manuscript does not contain the entirety of that call (or the totality of any of our subsequent interactions), as those single-spaced transcripts stretch to well over 2,400 pages. What I have done (to the best of my abilities) is excerpt the most critical and illuminating passages from each individual exchange. Parties interested in reading the complete transcripts may do so by visiting the basement of the Univ. of TexasPsychiatric Library, where the pages have been archived by local sociohistorian Daniel Arellano. They have also been transferred to microfiche and can be accessed through the attorney general’s office in the William P. Clements Building, 300 West 15th Street, Austin, Texas.]
    [Note to C. Bumpus: For purposes of simplicity and impact, I have elected to present Y____’s speech in a traditional prose style. Certain decisions—when to break paragraphs, when to include italics or employ unorthodox punctuation, when to encapsulate especially unwieldy stretches of dialogue—were dictated by my own peccadilloes. However, all of those decisions were solely driven by the desire to reflect Y____’s thoughts in a manner that best captured my experience. If this is a problem, we can address it later.]
    APRIL 11 (Y____ calls office line, 10:00 a.m.):
    Let’s begin. You know, I don’t mind talking like this. I’m sure you think I’m going to be one of those people who hires a therapist and then spends six weeks talking about how they hate talking about themselves, but I’m not that kind of guy. I’ll never understand why people behave like that. Do they feel some kind of social pressure to prove they’re not self-absorbed, even though the basis of this entire process is a critical examination of one’s own self-absorption? In this day and age, no one would ever say, “Therapy is ridiculous.” Right? Only a philistine would say that aloud, because we’ve all been conditioned to accept the value of this process. You’d have to be a jackass to think like that. Right? Yet when faced with the experience itself—whenever someone opens that interior door to the conscious and subconscious, fully aware they’re paying money to talk about themselves in a completely one-way relationship—everyone feels an urge to say, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here” or “I’m not very comfortable talking about myself” or “I don’t even know whatI’m supposed to be figuring out.” It’s childish, really. At this point, who doesn’t know what kind of conversation they’re supposed to have with a therapist? You enter therapy in order to confront