I had always been very clever about hiding my tracks. The computer just made sense to me. I’d been born into it, and from a young age could use it more naturally than either of my parents. For years I had been deeply immersed in worlds they could scarcely imagine, but I left no evidence. Let’s just say that some of the shit I was getting off to didn’t retain its appeal after the moment passed. Sometimes it made me feel quite ill to see it there on screen after I’d wiped myself clean, and I would quickly close out of the private tab I’d been using. Then, just to be safe, I would check the browser history, the clipboard, downloaded files, any newly saved prompts. Nothing was ever there, but I always checked, as if I wanted to scrub the memory from myself. Make it so that I had never seen what I just saw. Make it so that what I just saw did not have the effect on me that it did.
After these sessions, it was sometimes hard to return to the real world. I would walk around as if in a daze, disconnected from everything around me, at least until my levels returned to normal, or I got busy doing something else. Then I mostly forgot about it till the next day when it would again glimmer with its taboo allure.
“Maybe you wanted to get caught,” Tom suggests in one of our first meetings.
That’s when I knew for sure the man was an idiot. I knew all about Jung and Nietzsche already thanks to some videos I watched on YouTube. No strip mall therapist my parents picked out was going to provide any further insight into myself than I had already gleaned.
“You’re saying that maybe I wanted to get caught,” I say, repeating back what he said to show him how it felt. That was one of his go-to tricks he was always using on me.
“You are repeating back what I said because that’s what I sometimes do to you,” he states.
“I am repeating back what you said because that’s what you do to me.”
“Okay,” Tom says, closing the notebook and nodding his bald, beige head. He leans forward and I mimic his movement, so that we are both sitting leaning towards each other in his little square office between the Chinese buffet and discount dentist. There’s a plant in the front corner of the room, growing into a sharp lean to try to catch the light through the one sad window.
“It’s a fiddle-leaf fig,” Tom says when he catches me looking at it.
“It’s a fiddle-leaf fig,” I say back. Tom does that tight-lipped smile he uses to hide his frustration then he begins his next big trick, which is to remain silent until I feel so uncomfortable I blurt something out, I suppose.
“You like the taste of my words so much, swallow this,” I say and make a wanking motion then blow my imaginary load towards him.
“You don’t care much for me, do you?”
“Gee, what gave that away?”
“Do these appointments feel like a waste of time?” Tom asks. I don’t answer, so he waits a long moment then asks a follow up. “Do you think I have anything to offer you?”
I don’t intend to respond, but a snort of laughter escapes me.
“No,” I tell him. “You’re just the same as everyone else in this hellworld. How are you supposed to help me?”
“Can you help me understand what you mean by that?”
The sound of traffic is never not-filling this room. It’s small and sparse and cheap, located in a dying stripmall along the highway, which I motion towards as if that will explain it all, but Tom remains silent. He doesn’t get it.
“I mean look at the complete utter shit you drive past each day to get here. Do you even see it? There are people disintegrating on every street corner. Every business is a fucking joke. Miles of choking traffic. Wasting away at work. We live in fucking hell, and all of you people just drive right through it like with blinders on or something, never mentoning it or doing anything to change it. It makes me feel fucking crazy! You don’t come here to help me or anyone else. You come here because it’s your job. You do it for the money.”
“You’re right,” Tom nods, before amending himself: “about some of that at least. And you’re not alone. A lot of people feel that way, and you are not wrong to. Shit is fucked,” Tom agrees, which is probably the smartest thing I’ve heard him say in any of our sessions.
“Yes,” I say. “Thank you. So what’s the point?”
“Listen, I know what you want is an answer, but there are no easy answers. Anyone who tries to sell you one is just taking advantage of you for their own purposes, and there are a lot of people trying to do just that. They know the state of things. They know how lost young people feel, and they prey on that. The best thing you can do to counter these feelings is to connect with other people. I mean in real life. Not just online. I have two exercises I’d like to do, if you’re willing. The second is a little less orthodox, but I think it might be helpful for you.”
“Okay.”
“Okay? Cool. Let’s start with the more classic one. I want you to close your eyes. Take a deep breath in. Good. Now out. Nice and slow. Sink into a state of relaxation. In. And out. Good. Now I am going to ask you about your future. You stand to graduate high school soon. Realistically, what will be your situation at this time next year?”
“Same as it is now, except no class. I’ll go to work, I’ll come home.”
“And what do you see yourself doing for work?”
“I will still be at Wal-Mart.”
“And what will you do at home?”
“Internet stuff.”
“Okay, now push that to five years. You will be almost twenty-three. What will you be doing then?”
“Same as now, except I can go out for drinks after work.”
“You think you will still be living at home.”
“I don’t know.”
“And your job?”
“I mean hopefully I’ve gotten a promotion at least.”
“And who are you going out for drinks with?”
“I don’t know. I can’t really see them. People.”
“Work friends?”
“Yeah.”
“And do you have work friends now?”
“…no.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re all fucking losers.”
“What will change between now and then?”
“I’ll become one of them.”
“Okay,” Tom says more loudly so that I open my eyes. I think he thinks I am messing with him, but he really did have me in a kind of trance. “Let’s try the other exercise. It’s not one I do with everyone, but I think you will like it. It may sound a little strange, but I’ll instruct you as we go.”
“Okay,” I say, not expecting much.
“Close your eyes again, but this time I want you to envision yourself in your mind. Your thoughts are books that are flying around. I want you to settle your thoughts by catching these books and returning them to their place on the shelf. Catch them and place them on the shelf. When they are all in place and your mental air is clear, let me know by nodding. Good. Now I want you to envision there is a flashlight in your hand. Shine that flashlight down along your body. You are looking for a place that is emitting a strong sensation. You don’t have to know what that sensation is, but just feel for it. Take your time. Shine that light into every nook and cranny if you need to. When you find something, just nod. Good. Now, I want you to go near that sensation and bask it in the light. Sit with it and really look at it. Don’t try to define it, let it just become an image. Just really study the image as it appears. Good. Now open your eyes. Tell me about your experience.”
“Uh, I felt something like a knot in my gut.”
“Okay, and what kind of image did it take when you shined your flashlight on it?”
“It became a Tangela, like the Pokemon.”
“What did it look like? Help me to see it.”
“At first it looked just like that, like a purple spaghetti ball with red shoes and eyes peeking out of black shadows. Like how it looks on the card, or at least how I remember it looking. Cartoon-like, I mean. But when you told me to really look at it, it became more lifelike. Like what it might actually look like if it were a real creature. Like higher resolution. The vines took on more texture and it was like wet and kind of writhing, and somehow amphibian.”
“Where did you find it?”
“In my gut.”
“But what was the setting?”
“Oh, like a forest clearing.”
“Deep in the forest?”
“No. More like this ditch I used to go to when I was a kid. Like a drainage culvert below a road. But I called it a creek. And there was this pool there, with trees circling around it. It was more like that. And Tangela seemed to not be surprised. I mean, seemed kind of shy, but almost as if it was expecting me.”
“Is there anything you want to ask this Tangela?”
The creature from my mind now stands almost knee-height on the wooden floor between us looking just how I pictured it. The purple vines tense and writhe slightly in the still office air, and give off a strong smell, like that of mud newly turned over. A pair of large eyes peek out of its dense vegetal covering, but they don’t appear to focus on anything. I don’t feel shocked by its appearance, but more like I am still in a trance state.
“Go ahead,” Tom encourages. “Just whatever comes to mind. Go ahead and ask.”
“Uh what’s under all those vines?” I ask after a moment.
“Tangela,” the creature answers, speaking its own name, just like in the show.
“That’s the hour,” Tom says. “Tangela is going to go home with you. I want you to learn how to care for them and bring them with you to your appointment next week.”
“Hang on a second,” I say, shaking off the dream fog. “What in the fuck?”
“It’s your image. It came from you. You must care for it.”
The creature sits on the rug in the middle of my bedroom. It appears content enough, I suppose, but I have no idea what to do with it. It doesn’t really look like a Tangela anymore. It has crossed over too much into reality and lost all cartoonish aspects. It looks more like a jumble of sea plants one might find washed up on the shore. It hardly moves. Just hunkers there on the rug, reeking of mud. My parents had never let me have a dog or any other pet. Our house doesn’t even have any plants in it. What grows around its perimeter is just whatever survives my dad’s sporadic, hacking yard work. They don’t say much about the creature I am holding in the crook of my arm when I walk back into the house. They haven’t said much to me since finding what was on my computer. We didn’t have too active a relationship before that, either, to be honest. I told them Tom said I had to care for this thing. I didn’t mention that he had somehow conjured it out of my own imaginal realm. I don’t think they realized it was anything more than some tropical houseplant. Something temperamental that would require my close attention, like a second grader being given an egg or a bag of flour to care for.
For obvious reasons, I am not allowed to have my computer or my phone anymore, so I just sit in my room looking at this guy. There are moments in which I feel an overwhelming affection for it, and at one point, feeling he might be nervous, I am moved to reassure him in some way: “Don’t worry,” I say aloud. “I’m not going to Eraserhead you or anything.”
The Tangela blinks up at me, not understanding, but it is a relief to myself to hear those words, for I cannot deny that the thought of cutting away those vines to reveal what lay underneath had crossed my mind more than once, but now the idea of doing anything to harm the fella repulses me.
As it grows late, and I begin preparing for bed, I have a moment of panic, not knowing what to do with the creature as I sleep. It seems content enough to remain on the rug, I eventually decide. Its eyes are drooping already, and I figure if I turn off the lights it will quickly fall asleep, something I, myself, am unable to do for several hours, but at some point I must have slipped off because the next thing I know I am gasping awake in a sunlit room.
Tangela remains where I had left it, but it does not look so good. The vines are still and pale, his eyes tinted yellow and even droopier than they had been.
It occurs to me that I do have one screen in my room, somewhere, and I go digging in my closet, in desperate search for my old hand-me-down Gameboy Color. Finally I happen upon its cold, bright green plastic exterior. It is in a box shoved in the corner of my closet along with some of my other childhood possessions. The games are loose amongst the other junk, but a blue cartridge is already loaded in the game deck. I fire it on, and by some miracle the batteries still have some juice. Moving quickly, I navigate to my old save file and flip through the Pokedex, praying I had come across a Tangela at some point in my gameplay. Luckily I had, so its entry shows up, but the small write up is not exactly as helpful as I had hoped.
“The whole body is swathed with wide vines that are similar to seaweed. Its vines shake as it walks.”
Its vines certainly do look similar to seaweed, but I hadn’t seen it take a single step, so I cannot verify whether its vines shake or not. They had seemed to writhe the day before, whereas now they appear totally still, almost limp. In frustration, I return to the box of toys and dig through them until I find Pokemon Gold with which I go through the same motions as Blue, only to receive this tidbit of equally unhelpful knowledge: “The vines that cloak its entire body are always jiggling. They effectively unnerve its foes.”
They aren’t jiggling, I think frantically, even as I remind myself this thing is not actually a Tangela because Tangela is a Pokemon and Pokemon are not real. Still, whatever this thing in front of me is, it is undoubtedly real, and it really appears to be dying.
“Hang in there, buddy,” I say, and, in an alien fit of paternal concern, I rush downstairs and out the back door and let myself into my dad’s tool shed. He has a shovel in there that has never seen much use. I tear it from the wall where it hangs and begin looking for a container of some kind. There is a cardboard box from a recent Amazon delivery waiting to be broken down and placed in the recycling bin. I take it and dash into the backyard where I dig up shovelfuls of grass, filling the box with dirt and vegetation. Once full, I drop the shovel and carry the box into the house and up the stairs, leaving a trail of muddy footprints and spilled dirt behind me.
Back in my room, I carefully lift the weak creature and set it in the box. It moves a little, adjusting itself like a chicken getting comfortable in a nest. Instantly it seems to look somewhat improved, I think, but it is still much weaker than yesterday. Another thought occurs to me and I run back down the stairs and into the kitchen. My parents don’t seem to be around, which I am thankful for, because I must appear to be in quite a state.
In the kitchen, I tear open cabinet doors, not exactly sure what I am looking for, but finally, under the sink, I find something that I think might help: an unlabeled plastic spray bottle. I undo the top and smell its contents which look like water and smell of nothing, but just to be safe I tilt the bottle towards my lips and take a taste. It is stale and plasticky, but undoubtedly water. I pour the remaining contents down the sink and refill it with fresh water from the tap, then I am back up the stairs, lifting the box, now heavy with its nested occupant, up onto my dresser, which is situated beneath my single window. I yank at the cords to raise the blinds and expose the creature to what little sunlight is available. Then I twist the nozzle into the ON position and begin spraying it. I continue until I have emptied the bottle, and then I pause to examine my work.
The creature shimmies happily, apparently having returned to health. I take a deep breath as its vines begin to writhe once again, muscled like healthy snakes. A bright, toxic purple color blooms from within, and the little guy’s eyes open wide and fix on me, and mine on him. The jiggling of his vines does not unnerve me, but rather touches me deeply. I want to hug it, to hold it close to my chest and sob into its living tendrils. What is this, I think ridiculously? What is happening? I am crying and laughing and shaking uncontrollably as I kneel beside my dresser and gaze upon this creature’s concealed face. The tears are wrenched from some deep rupture within and they wrack my body with almost painful contortions. It’s like the ending of the goddamn Grinch, I think self-mockingly as the hollow of my chest aches hotly.
The Tangela creature looks at me and I look at it, and for a moment, at least, all else is moot.