Read by Greg Page
The first time, Burton’s client arrived anticipating an avalanche of snakes. This is a common misapprehension. As an exposure therapist, he helps people overcome phobias, but contrary to their fears, there is no immediate confrontation. They are edged gently towards their tormentor.
At parties, he is often asked: what are you afraid of? He insists they change their question’s tense: what were you afraid of? Naturally, he explains, he has mastered his own fears before helping others overcome theirs.
His client is late. He abhors tardiness. The only client he had accepted this from was a man with a terror of time itself. In his drawer a muffled clock had tick-tocked innocuously as they worked towards an anxiety-free future.
*
On the walls of his office framed certificates attest to his excellence. Each day the pavement outside his office plays host to shaking shadows cast by medical rejects. Possibilities exhausted, they appear, apprehensive, upon his doorstep.
Once clients begin therapy, intimate relationships develop. Often they are confiding for the first time. He reassures them that they are not alone. But it’s a position of trust prone to abuse. He knows of at least one therapist who has been struck off for engaging in mutual exposures with a patient.
Even so, it’s through his work that he met his current wife. She arrived with a crippling fear of escalators. It seemed an old-fashioned affliction. Originally, department stores, upon unveiling their escalators, had staff dispense gins to the intrepid who had braved these seemingly sentient stairways. She spoke with terror of being chewed into the workings, rows of metal teeth advancing upon soft flesh. Tracing back, they discovered a grazed knee from childhood that had festered, psychologically. With the aid of a treadmill, he built her confidence. In a shopping centre, with him acting as her crutch, she stepped upon her nemesis. Afterwards, she rode them aimlessly, victorious, practically dancing as she revels in less fretful steps. He watched her with uxorious pride.
He sees all types: nervous flyers promoted to positions where air travel becomes unavoidable, cynophobics in new relationships with dog lovers. Others, and these are the easiest to help, have become despondent at their nervous servitude. No longer will they yield to irrationalities. He helps people reclaim their lives. Like an exorcist banishing demons, he casts their phobias out. Italicised upon his business card: Together we will conquer your fears.
He checks the time. His client is fifteen minutes late. This is unacceptable. His therapy has only just begun. Sessions are still conversational. Levels of exposure will steadily increase, advance to still photographs, videos, a cuddly toy, a tactile afternoon with a snakeskin shoe, headphones which hiss persistently, a gradual depletion of unfamiliarity before confronting the object of his distress.
For an island with few indigenous snakes, it’s astonishing how many people share this affliction. It seems irrational, but then that is often a phobia’s defining feature. Of course it isn’t just direct contact that proves petrifying. Their sudden appearance in a film, a slithering cameo, is enough to rattle sufferers, leave them red-faced, barnacled with scattered popcorn. Any semblance can unsettle them.
Such uncontrollable glitches bring many men to his practice. They do not respond well to kinks in their bravado. Embarrassed to be seeking help, they arrive in steely denial. Rationalising their situation, they talk of predator alertness, long shadows cast by Neanderthal ancestors, atavistic flashbacks. Cocksure, some have stiff-lipped their way into improbable positions including, incredibly, a practising dentist with a fear of needles. A high-functioning phobic, he has developed his own coping mechanisms.
In the comfort of his office, warriors reluctantly expose Achilles’ heels. No matter how preposterous their anxieties, he remains straight-faced. A wry smile sends the wrong signals. He offers solidarity. His wife understands better than most this need for confidentiality. Friends ask for his most unusual cases, but he refuses to be drawn. For the purposes of dinner party babble, he will not discredit his clientele. Tight-lipped, he ignores their pleas. Let others stoop to belittling debilitations for cheap laughs.
Diligent to a fault, he once shaved off his beard to pacify a pogonophobe. She was surprised to discover her condition had a name. Plundering Greek and Latin, any aversion could be validated. Unsurprisingly, in her case, he discovered that it was not so much beards as their wearers that unnerved her; specifically, an uncle who loved to touch. To his wife’s dismay, he grew his own beard back. Having itched its way through, he resumed twiddling individual whiskers as he listened to his clients.
This is the third session that his snake-fearing client has missed. Follow-up phone calls have proved fruitless.
He is unaccustomed to having his time wasted in this manner. As he looks about his office he recalls past triumphs. There was the man with a morbid dread of nudity. Other naked forms proved unproblematic, but as to his own body, he couldn’t bear it. He wore a blindfold in the shower. By increments, Burton persuaded him to remove an item of clothing at each session, a process resumed from conclusion the following week. He had never coaxed a man from his clothes before. Over two months he endured the world’s slowest striptease, which culminated with his client dancing naked around his office, a victory streak. Patients often experience mild euphoria. Emancipated, they regain control of their lives, leave his office freed of demons, or at least the most prominent of their number.
No one has tried to walk out for some time. It is a commitment not so easily broken. He takes initial interviews as verbal contracts: they will conquer their fears.
Accepting that his client is not going to make an appearance, he busies himself. He will administer to the needs of his phobia room.
Accessed through a side door, the phobia room is the antithesis of his office’s safe haven. No natural light permeates this space. Musty, it channels half-remembered museums. At the light’s flicker, the sound of movement, furtive rustles as things awake. It’s a haphazard arrangement. Beside a snake tank, a cage of nervous mice deal with their own issues. He sprinkles titbits, critters nibbling oblivious to their function. Nestled softly nearby, anthropomorphised counterparts, the terrifying reduced to cuddly versions of themselves.
The stuffy room plays host to a menagerie of taxidermied animals. In specimen jars: contorted, pickled horrors. Displayed in trays, an array of insects and arachnids, moths and butterflies crucified. In drawers, bagged examples of niche catalysts: bees and bones, feathers and fur, tablets and teeth.
Redundant technologies rust. On reel-to-reels, a sound effects library, which instils shivers in listeners. A slide projector sits silently. Beside it, a carousel of nightmares gathers dust. Concertina folders, bulbous accordions, provide an archive of palpitation-inducing photographs. For his clients, twisted Proustian rushes, anti-madeleines, totems invoking past traumas.
Only he has access to the phobia room. He finds it gives him great strength, to stand invincible amidst stimuli that reduce others to quivering wrecks. His wife has accused him of making a show of his bravery. Who though, he asked her, wishes to consult a jittery therapist?
He imagines a client trapped inside overnight, discovering them the next day, hyperventilating, eyes screwed tightly shut. They would leave, no doubt, with additional anxieties.
Such extensive paraphernalia links him with high-class prostitution, the well-stocked brothel furnishing every recherché whim. He even owns uniforms, authority figure cast-offs, in which he dresses to address clients’ problems.
Each case adds something new to his collection, his history of vanquished fears.
His wife, he knows, imagines he prefers the company of the anxious, responds well to distress signals. She has little of that to offer him. She senses his diminished interest since overcoming her fear, perhaps suspects infidelities with the vulnerable: a twitcher clutched tightly in a bat cave; a damsel serenaded across a vertiginous rope bridge. Would she need to weaken again, she had asked him, in order to strengthen their marriage?
She’s accused him of loving his phobia room more than her, has rashly suggested that he have her stuffed, mounted and placed centre-stage. At least that way, she said, they would be guaranteed time together.
Impressive as it is, he dreams of expanding his room still further. He imagines an infinite space, a room of amorphous dimensions that could warp to combat every possible phobia, that could expand, upon entrance, to challenge the agoraphobic, open out beneath them into a yawning chasm for the acrophobic, condense into a restrictive cell for the claustrophobic, allow space for planes to take off for the aerophobic. Carried away on mind-bending eddies, he realises that such a room would, of necessity, be a full-scale replica of the world itself.
Weeks ago, he had unlocked the door and entered. Hello, said a voice from the shadows. Startled, he’d jumped, backed into an antique phrenology head, gasping as it shattered. What the? His wife emerged from the gloom. I thought I’d made it quite clear . . . But she was laughing at him, had never seen him scared before. He stooped to the floor; collecting fragments of the head, he tried to jigsaw it back together. He placed the shards upon his desk and moved towards her. Livid, he ushered her out. She had invaded his inner sanctum, plundered his Wunderkammer, ransacked stacked Kryptonites. What had she expected to find?
She packed and left that evening.
*
He takes great pride in his work, makes the world more hospitable for those with a suspended sense of threat. His website is a roll call of glowing testimonials. He keeps a sheaf of letters, heartfelt thanks from people unanchored from previous encumbrances. More than once he has been told: you’ve given me my life back.
His dedication witnesses expeditions outside office hours. Holding his patients’ hands he escorts them into their nightmares: a butterfly house run with a woman who had shuddered at their flutter; a circus visit with a man brought down by clowns. But it is no altruistic gesture. He doesn’t believe in failing better, he refuses to be defeated.
No one has ever walked away from his office with their fears intact. Yet out there, somewhere, is his truant client, a man running from his problems.
Only being genuinely indisposed would justify non-attendance. Perhaps his client has decided to run before he can walk, arranged a trip to the Amazon in search of anacondas. He imagines the man’s final minutes spent within the snake’s awful jaws, before being ingested with grim efficiency into the lethal sleeping bag of its body.
*
He stands in his phobia room. His client’s fifty minutes are up and once more he has declined to arrive. This weak-willed individual will scupper Burton’s success rate. Connecting unrelated strands—his wife’s departure, his truant client—he concocts adultery. He imagined secret rendezvous’, his wife drinking snakebites as she succumbs to this charlatan’s charms. Still, he finds it hard to believe she would leave him for someone with such a prosaic phobia.
Aside from the odd rustle, he stands there in silence. Alone now; his wife will no longer surprise him. What’s more, he has failed his client. Idly, he fondles the triggers which instilled chills in his visitors: a plastic bat, a rubber puppy, a fistful of feathers. But they refuse to move him. Flawless, granite-jawed, he will not register his dread. ‘What are you afraid of?’ people ask him. They will never know.
(c) Stuart Snelson, 2016
Stuart Snelson lives in London. His writing has appeared in 3:AM, Ambit, Bare Fiction, HOAX, Lighthouse, Popshot, Structo and Synaesthesia, among others, and he was shortlisted for the 2016 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. He can be found online at stuartsnelson.wordpress.com and on Twitter @stuartsnelson
Aged six, Greg Page was cast as Joseph in his infant school nativity. Somebody put a tea towel on his head and he became someone else. He hasn't been himself since. He can be contacted through roseberymanagement.com and has no idea what he's done with his keys.
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