Therapy

Judy Tanaka and her therapist sat in an awkward though not especially hostile silence for almost all the first half of the session. Winter sun streamed into the basement room, and the shadows cast by the window frames cut the carpeted floor into sharp, bright diamonds of light. Judy's therapist, a slender, youthful but grey-haired woman who wore big rings and yellow silk stockings, stared out of the window at the overgrown Kentish Town garden beyond, but she had the trick of letting her clients know that her attention was still in the room with them should it be required.

Judy Tanaka had spent a of time wondering about her therapist, chiefly about her sexual orientation, whether or not she was gay, and whether or not there was some sort of unprofessional hostility to be found in the cold way she greeted Judy at the beginning of each session. Maybe the therapist hated her because she wasn't gay, because she had a lively hetero sex life that the therapist couldn't hope to emulate. Maybe she was jealous. Maybe she wanted to seduce her patient. But Judy had concluded that this sort of speculation was an understandable but nevertheless irrelevant and all too obvious evasion of the matters at hand. She did her best to stop thinking about her therapist and start talking about herself.

At long last she said, 'I think something very strange is happening to me.'
'Something good?' the therapist asked, alowly turning her head towards Judy, and untangling her attention from the garden.
'I don't know exactly,' Judy replied. 'But I definitely think I'm changing.'
And in what way or ways are you changing?'
Judy wriggled in the big, creased, leather chair and thought hard before answering.
'I think I'm becoming more complex. More dense, more full of noise and pollution, more beset by problems of organization and infrastructure.'

The therapist looked at Judy dumbly, suspiciously, and Judy was dismayed by her unconcealed lack of interest and understanding.

'Sometimes I feel bombed and blitzed,' Judy said. 'And sometimes I feel plagued. Sometimes I feel like I'm on fire, and other times like I'm lost in a fog, in a real old-fasioned pea-souper.'