Porous

Chapter Four: Oil-Slick Colors

“How do you like your new wilderness group?”

“I really like them. Well, not all of them. But Paul is great – he’s new, you might not have met him yet. He’s really funny. And I like Clara, too, although she’s a little bit stiff.”

“Stiff?”

“She’s hard to talk to. She can be very formal. Follows all the rules and all that.”

I’m sitting in Dr. Chase’s office, staring around at the photographs of scenic beaches and forests and mountains and wishing I were in those places instead of here in this office.

“Do you feel comfortable talking to her?”

“Umm, not really, not yet. But it’s only been two months with this new group. I think I’ll get to know them better.”

I had to be switched out of my old group after I tried to throw myself off a cliff. The counselors thought that some of the other kids had been mildly traumatized, so they moved me to a new group with “fresh faces,” as Dr. Chase put it.

“Have you had any more nightmares?”

Dr. Chase asks this question every time we meet together. I open my mouth to respondno, as I have done so often recently. Truthfully, I dream about the shadows almost every night. But I stopped telling my therapists about them when I realized they didn’t believe that they were real. No, no more nightmares, they’ve gone away now, I’ve been lying for months. But since I’ve finally admitted to myself that there is no escape from this world, I have to try again. I have to tell someone about the dreams.

“Yes.”

“When?” she asks, her blond hair reflecting sunlight in the afternoon glare.

“Last night. It was bad.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It started off like a normal dream. I was in a forest, a bamboo forest. And then the bamboo changed into columns, and then the shadows on the columns started growing, like they always do.” I hesitate before my next words, knowing I’m risking being labeledschizophrenic again. “They do that in real life, too.”

I’ve talked to my therapists about the shadows before. I’ve even talked to Dr. Chase about them, a little bit. I’ve described, as best I can, what it feels like when they grow and swallow me, the blackness, the darkness, the helpless sense of nothing that is inescapable. But I’ve never really gone into physical detail, the feeling of it, the look of it, at least not since I was little. No one ever imagines that I’m talking about something real.

“What do you mean, Noomi?” Dr. Chase’s tone is puzzled, curious. Neutral. She doesn’t believe me. But I plow ahead anyway.

“On Sunday, on the mountain, as we were coming down, the shadows on the trees started to…detach. They grew until they were all around me, like fog. I felt like I was being swallowed.”

“What does it feel like when they surround you?”

“Like emptiness. Like nothingness. I feel like I’m being drained away and there’s nothing left of me.”

She cocks her head to the side, a little frown on her face.

“What do the shadows look like, Noomi?”

I stare at her.

“Like shadows,” I say. “Normal shadows. From trees, or buildings, or people. But they grow and get bigger and detach from the real houses or trees or whatever, and…” I don’t want to say they come after me, because I know how childish that sounds. Like monsters waiting in the dark. I’m not a child, I think, ashamed of my own fear. My voice comes out in a whisper. “They attack.”