Peculiar Adventure (MPHFPC Millard X Reader)

Dr.Golan

     Eventually, my parents did take me to a brain-shrinker-a quiet, olive-skinned man named Dr.Golan. I didn't put up a fight. I knew I needed help.
     I thought I'd be a tough case, but Dr.Golan made surprisingly quick work for me. The calm, affectless way he explained things was almost hypnotizing, and within two sessions he'd convinced me that the creature had been nothing more than the prodcut of my overheated imagination; that the trauma of my grandfather's death had made me see something that wasn't really there. It was Grandpa Portman's stories that had planted the creature in my mind to begin with, Dr.Golan explained, so it only made sense that, kneeling there with his body in my arms and reeling from the worst shock in my young life, I had conjured up my grandfather's own bogeyman.
     There was even a name for it: acute stress reaction. "I don't see anything cute about it," my mother said when she heard my shiny new diagnosis. Her joke didn't bother me, thought. Almost everything was better than crazy.
     Just because I no longer believed the monsters were real didn't mean I was better, though. I still suffered from nightmares. I was twitchy and paranoid, bad enough at interacting with other people that my parents hired a tutor so that I only had to go to school on days I felt up to it. They also-finally-let me quit Smart Aid. "Feeling better" became my new job.
     Pretty soon, I was determined to be fired from this one, too. Once the small matter of my temporary madness had been cleared up, Dr.Golan's function seemed mainly to consist of writing perscriptions. Still having nightmares? I've got something for that. Panic attack on the school bus? This should do the trick. Can't sleep? Let's up the dosage. All those pills were making me fat and stupid, and I was still miserable, getting only three or four hours of sleep a night. That's why I started lying to Dr.Golan. I pretened to be fine when anyone who looked at me could see the bags under my eyes and the way I jumped like a nervous cat at sudden noises. One week I faked an entire dream journal, making my dream sound bland and simple, the way a normal person's should be. One dream was about going to the dentist. In another I was flying. Two nights in a row, I told him, I'd dreamed I was naked in school.
     Then he stopped me. "What about the creatures?"
     I shrugged. "No sign of them. Guess that means I'm getting better, huh?"
     Dr.Golan tapped his pen for a moment and then wrote something down. "I hope you're not telling me what you think I want to hear."
     "Of course not," I said, my gaze skirting the framed degres on his wall, all attesting to his experness in various subdisciplines of psychology, including, I'm sure, how to tell when an acutely stressed teenager is lying to you.
     "Let's be real for a minute." He set down his pen. "You're telling me you didn't have the dream even one night this week?"
     I'd always been a terrible liar. Rather than humiliate myself, I coped to it. "Well," I muttered, "maybe one."
     The truth was that I'd had the dream every night that week. With minor variations, it always went like this: I'm crouched in the corner of my grandfather's bedroom, amber dusk-light retreating from the windows, pointing a pink plastic BB rifle at the door. An enormous glowing vending machine looms where the bed should be, filled not with candy but rows of razor-sharp tactical knives and  armor-piercing pistols. My grandfather's there in an old British army uniform, feeding the machine dollar bills, but it takes a lot to buy a gun and we're running out of time. Finally, a shiny .45 spins toward the glass, but before it falls it gets stuck. He swears in Yiddish, kicks the machine, then kneels down and reaches inside to try and grab it, but his arm gets caught. That's when they come, their long black tongues slithering up the outside of the glass, looking for a way in. I point the BB gun at them and pull the trigger, but nothing happens. Meanwhile Grandpa Portman is shouting like a crazy person-find the bird, find the loop, Yakob vai don't you understand you goddamed stupid yutzi-and then the windows shatter and glass rains in and the black tongues are all over us, and that's generally when I wake up in a puddle of sweat, my heart doing hurdles and my stomach tied in knots.
     Even though the dream was always the same and we'd been over it a hundred times, Dr.Golan still made me describe it in every session. It's like he was cross-examining my subconscios, looking for some clue he might have missed the ninety-ninth time around.
     "And in the dream, what's your grandfather saying?"
     "The same stuff as always," I said. " About the bird and the loop and the grave."
     "His last words."
     I nodded.
     Dr.Golan tented his fingers and pressed them to his chin, the very picture of a thoughtful brain-shrinker. "Any new ideas about what that might mean?"
     "Yeah. Jack and shit."
     "Come on. You don't mean that."
     I wanted to act like I didn't care about the last words, but I did. They'd been eating away at me almost as much as the nightmares. I felt like I owed it to my grandfather not to dismiss the last thing he said to anyone in the world as delusional nonsense, and Dr.Golan was convinced that understanding them might help me purge my awful dreams. So I tried.
     Some of what grandpa Portman had said made sense, like the thing about wanting me to go to the island. He was worried that the monsters would come after me, and thought the island was the only place I could escape them, like he had as a kid. After that he'd said, "I should've told you," but  because there was no time to tell me whatever it was he should've told me, I wondered if he hadn't done the next best thing and left a trail of bread crumbs leading to someone who could tell me-someone who knew his secret. I figured that's what all the cryptic-sounding stuff about the loop and the grave and the letter was.
     For a while I thought "the loop" could be a street in Circle Village-a neighborhood that was nothing but looping cul-de-sacs-and that "Emerson" might be a person my grandfather had sent letters to. An old war buddy he'd kept in touch with or something. Maybe this Emerson lived in Cicrle Village, in oe of its loops, by a graveyard, and one of the letters he'd kept dated September third, 1940, and that was one I needed to read. I knew it sounded crazy, but crazier things have turned out to be true. So after hitting dead-ends online I went to Circle Village commnity center, where the old folks gather to play shuffleboard and discuss their most recent surgeries, to ask where the graveyard was and whether anyone knew a Mr.Emerson. They looked at me like I had a second head growing out of my neck, baffled that a teenaged person was speaking to them. There was no graveyard in Circle Village and no one in the neighborhood named Emerson and no street called Loop Drive or Loop Avenue or Loop anything. It was a complete bust.
     Still, Dr.Golan wouldn't let me quit. He suggested I look into Ralph Waldo Emerson, a supposedly famous poet. "Emerson wrote  his fair share of letters," he said. "Maybe that's what your grandfather was referring to." It seemed like a shot in the dark, but, just to get Golan off my back, one afternoon I had my dad drop me off at the library so I could check it out. I quickly discovered that Ralph Waldo Emerson had indeed written lots of letters that had been published. For about three minutes I got really excited, like I was close to a breakthrough, and then two things became apparent; first, that Ralph Waldo Emerson had lived and died in the 1800s and therefore could not have written any letters dated September third, 1940, and, second, that his writing was so dense and arcane that it couldn't possibly have held the slightest interest for my grandfather, who wasn't exactly an avid reader. I discovered Emerson's soporific qualities the hard way, by falling asleep with my face in a book, drooling all over an essay called "Self-Reliance" and having the vending machine dream for the sixth time that week. I woke up screaming and was unceremoniously ejectted from the library, cursing Dr.Golan and his stupid theories all the while.
     The last straw came a few days later, when my family decided it was time to sell Grandpa Portman's house. Before prospective buyers could be allowed inside, though, the place had to be cleaned out. On the advice of Dr.Golan, who thought it would be good for me to "confront the scene of my trauma," I was enlisted to help my dad and Aunt Susie sort through the detritus. For a while after we got to the house my dad kept taking me aside to make sure I was okay. Suprisingly, I seemed to be, despite the scraps of police tape clinging to the shrubs and the torn screen on the lanai flapping in the breeze;these things-like the rented Dumpster that stood on the curb, waiting to swallow what remained of my grandfather's life-made me sad, not scared.
     Once it became clear I wasn't about to suffer a mouth-frothing freak-out, we got down to business. Armed with garbage bags we proceeded grimly though the house, emptying shelves and cabinets and crawl spaces, discovering geometrics of dust beneath objects unmoved for years. We built pyramids of things that could be saved or salvaged and pyramids of things destined for the Dumpster. My aunt and father were not sentimental people, and the Dumpster pile was always the largest. I lobbied hard to keep certain things, like the foot stack of water-damaged National Geographic magizines teetering in a corner of the garage but I was always overruled.
     I told my dad he was being heartless. My aunt feld the scene, leaving us alone in the study, where we'd been sorting through a montain of old financial records.
     "I'm just being practical. This is what happens when people die, Jacob."
     "Yeah? How about when you die? Should I burn all your old manuscripts?"
     He flushed. I shouldn't have said it; mentioning his half-finished book projects was definitely below the belt. Instead of yelling at me though, he was quiet. "I brought you along today because I thought you were mature enough to handle it. I guess I was wrong."
     "You are wrong. You think getting rid of Grandpa Portman's stuff will make me forget him. But it won't."
     He threw his hands up. "You know what? I'm sick of fighting about it. Keep whatever you want." He tossed a sheaf of yellowed papers at my feet. "Here's an itemized schedle of dedctions from the year Kennedy was assassinated. Go get it framed!"
     I kicked away the papers and walked out, slamming the door behind me, and waited in the living room for him to come out and apologize. When I heard the shredder roar to life. I knew he wasn't going to, so I stomped across the house and locked myself in the bedroom. It smelled of stale air and shoe leather and my grandfather's slightly sour colonge. I leaned against the wall, my eyes following a trail worn into the carpet between the door and the bed, where a rectangle of muted sun caught the edge of a box that poked out from beneath the bedspread. I went over and knelt down and pulled it out. It was a old cigar box, enveloped in dust-as if he'd left it there just for me to find.
     Inside were the photos I knew so well; the invisible boy and his ice weilding girlfriend, the leavitating girl, the boulder lifter, the man with the face painted on the back of his head. They were brittle and peeling-smalller than I remembered, too-and looking at them now, as an almost adult, it struck me how blatant the fakery was. A little burning and dodging was probably all it took to make the "invisible" boy's head to disappear, and dust on the camera lens that took them could easily be faked as the "snowflakes" surronding the couple. The giant rock being hoisted by that suspiciosly scrawny kid could have easily been made out of plaster or foam. But these observations were too subtle for a six-year-old, especially one who wanted to believe.
     Beneath those photos were five more that Grandpa Portman had never shown me. I wondered why, until I looked closer. Three were so obviously manipulated that even a kid would've seen through them; one was a laughable double exposure of a girl "trapped" in a bottle; another showed a "levitating"child, suspened by something hidden in the dark doorway behind her; the third was a dog with a boy's face pasted crudley onto it. As if these weren't bizarre enough, the last two were like something out of David Lynch's nightmares:one was an unhappy young contortionist doing a frightening backbend; in the other a pair of freakish twins were dressed in the weirdest costmes I'd ever seen. Even my grandfather, who'd filled my head with stories of tentacle-tongued monsters, had realized images like these would give any kid bad dreams.
     Kneeling there on my grandfather's dusty floor with those photos in my hand, I remembered how betrayed I'd felt the day I realized his stories weren't true. Now the truth seemed obvious: his last words had been just another sleight of hand, and his last act was to infect me with nightmares and paranoid delsions that would take years of therapy and metabolism-wrecking medications to rout out.
     I closed the box and brought it into the living room, where my dad and Aunt Susie were emptying a drawer full of coupons, clipped but never used, into a ten-gallon trash bag.
     I offered up the box. They didn't ask what was inside.