A man sat in a small waiting room minding his own business. Occasionally he would wonder if the young receptionist, who sat just a few feet away from him, ever took a public relations training seminar on how to handle clientele. He could ignore the occasional sneak peeks of the other people in the waiting room, but seeing the early twenty-something year old girl stare fixatedly into his eyes while her entire face was a deep shade of red made him comfortable.
Though of course, it was completely understandable. After all, how many clients came in shortly after lunch time without a shred of clothing? Only a single magazine taken from the waiting room’s coffee table hid his manliness from her prying eyes. It was just his luck that the magazine in question was a fitness magazine with a very attractive woman wearing a bikini on the front cover.
Just when he was starting to wonder if he should leave, the door leading to a series of offices opened up. A slightly older woman than the receptionist, but still probably about half his age, stood there in a sexy outfit as if just to mock him.
She wore a white blouse, with a dark grey ankle length skirt that was slit almost up to the thigh. He didn’t know why she actually wore it, but he imagined it was so her leg could be free to tantalize and torture her male clientele. Her hair was tied up in a ponytail and a pair of thick glasses gave her all the seductive powers of a hot, sexy librarian.
“Markus…” She started to call out to him with a smile, but when her eyes fell upon his current state she was at a loss for words. “I’ll see you now… why don’t you come in?”
“Ah, thank you Dr. Preece.”
“Markus, if you insist on addressing me by my last name and position, then I will insist on addressing you by your last name and position. And please, keep the magazine with you.” She calmly added when he looked unsure if it would be okay or not.
“Thanks, uh, Olivia.”
“There. Isn’t that better?”
“Not really.” It always made Markus uncomfortable how a woman roughly half his age would smile at him like that. And while he didn’t like her calling him by the numerous certifications that added prefixes before his name, he found it awkward to not call her doctor. She was, after all, his therapist.
“Let me just put something down on the sofa for you…”
She fluttered around the small office for a minute before coming back with today’s newspaper and unfolding a few sheets over her leather sofa. She had spent months trying to get it in through the small doors and after all the self-effort of taking it apart and reassembling it piece by piece, she made sure to take good care of it. The paper crinkled loudly as he sat down. He was tempted to eat some of the mints that Dr. Preece kept in a bowl in front of the sofa, but he was worried that reaching for them would end up with him exposing his ‘little marker’.
After everyone was finally sitting down she got started with the usual session spiel. “So. What brings you by today? You haven’t been by for a session in a couple of months and from the phone call it sounded like it was very important that we meet today?”
He gestured his current outfit of the one magazine. “I would say that when I showed up to your office completely in the nude, something significant probably had happened to me.”
“Yes. I had, noticed, that.” She emphasized it in such a way that made him wish he was in better shape. Hmm, and twenty years younger. “So what did happen?”
He drifted off into memory lane as he tried to think about where to start. “Well, there was a fire… I quit my job… started a revolution-“
“WAIT!” Dr. Preece had to stop him because it looked like he would have kept going on for a while if she didn’t and he had already revealed some heavy topics. “That’s a lot. Why don’t you start off at the beginning and we’ll see if we need more time. Does that sound alright with you?”
“Sure.” He should probably limit shrugging his shoulders. Every time he shrugged the newspaper made noise and the magazine had to be readjusted under Dr. Preece’s watchful eye. “Well, you already know that my wife and daughter hate me.”
She was scribbling notes down as she replied, “yes. Yes.”
“And it’s not a figment of my imagination.”
“Yes. Yes. I remember the dinner with your family. I saw the way they looked at you and treated you when they thought their ‘guest’ wasn’t looking. I still can’t believe she spat in your glass.”
“You never told me she spat in my glass?”
“Hmm? I’m sure I did.”
“Well, anyway. It’s been getting worse at the house recently.”
“Worse?”
“Yeah. She complains about everything I do straight to my face and then she tells me to leave her alone whenever I say anything to her. And she’s been taking a lot of phone calls lately, but she refuses to tell me who she’s talking to.”
Dr. Preece scribbled so furiously that Markus wondered if he should pause to give her time to catch up with her note taking. If it wasn’t for her gesturing for him to continue he would have stopped several times already.
“And my daughter just wants money or some new line of crazy-expensive makeup.”
“Okay. So things have been getting worse at home. How about at work?”
“Well, it was the same old story with work. That jackass of a manager keeps throwing his workload onto me and taking the credit for everything I do. And I can’t complain because ever since I was put onto his ‘special projects team’ he’s had the power to fire me the instant I do something he doesn’t like. Even worse, he keeps giving me bad reviews and passing me over for promotion. I just saw a guy who had only been working there for two weeks get promoted over me! And I’ve been there for over ten years!”
Did she really already fill three pages? Her hands were a blur across the paper ever since he started talking, so maybe she was just writing down everything he said and her own notes. He could teacher her a trick to writing in short hand if she had a couple of hours. “So how did that make you feel?”
“How do you think it made me feel? ANGRY! I was angry!”
“You know that’s not what I meant. Rather than emotionally feeling, what did you want to do to express that feeling?”
“I wanted to throw things. To break one of his precious commemorative plates, or maybe punch him in the face. But really, I just wanted to quit so badly.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No. No matter how many times I dreamed of it I never did.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s like my dad always said. ‘If life gives you lemons, then you’re the one who screwed up. Not life. So if you’re not happy then you’re the reason you’re not happy.’”
“If I remember correctly we spent a good deal of time talking about your childhood raising. I thought we both agreed that your father was wrong in nearly every matter and you shouldn’t be taking his advice.”
“I remember and I’m trying to live without recalling something my dad once said or did.”
“Good! So then why didn’t you quit a job you clearly hated?”
“Because I needed the job!” He yelled out in exacerbation. “I needed to make money in order to pay for the house, the car, taxes, saving up for my daughter’s future tuition, food and clothing. I also needed to put money away for my retirement… and if I lost that job I just knew that asshole would do everything in his power to blacklist me. I’d never be able to find a job in the same field again.”
“So what changed? Why did you quit your job now?”
“Well the fire for one.”
“The fire?”
“Yeah. I was either going to quit or I was going to be fired after that little incident.”
“Fire, no matter how you spin it, a fire doesn’t sound very ‘little’ to me. You mean to say that you caused a small fire that created a big incident, right?”
Markus chuckled madly. “Oh, no. Kukuku. It was definitely both a big fire and a big incident. It caused a revolution in the company after all, but no. It was a pretty big fire too.”
“What? You started a revolution?”
“Yep!” He was way too proud about that. But fuck that company! “It was wonderful. You should have been there. People were throwing stacks of paper at each other, toner was being used as a mace and someone had got his hands on a bunch of lightbulbs. He looked like a fluorescent light samurai! Kukuku.
“Back up. What started the fire?”
“Oh, that was me!”
“Why did you start a fire?”
“I was pretty pissed when my manager was bragging on the phone that he was already finished his work. When in reality he pushed it off to me and forced me to work through my lunch break to finish it. So when he held out his hand for the work I did, I decided to give it to him with one small additional change.”
“The fire?”
“FIRE!”
He cheerfully repeated the word while raising his fists into the air like he had just accomplished something. When he stopped Markus noticed that Dr. Preece was silently writing something with an intense focus. Leaning over he attempted to read the words upside down.
“…tendencies…creative… pyromaniac…candle wax… what?”
Her notes were all over the place and only served to confuse him further as he tried to make sense of what his therapist jotted down. She pulled her notes closer to her chest, reminding him of kid trying to stop a cheater from looking at her work.
“So you started a fire for revenge. Is that how you lost your clothes? Did they catch fire?”
“What? No, I didn’t lose my clothes.”
“Oh?”
“No, I used them to tie my boss to his chair.”
Dr. Preece didn’t respond immediately. She waited for him to say ‘it was a joke’ or that it was meant in a different way. She couldn’t mentally process that the kind man, who may have been unhappy with his life but never showed even a glimpse of violent tendencies before, would have ever done something like that.
“You assaulted your boss?”
“That’s what the police told me. They wanted to call it kidnapping though, but my lawyer says he’s going to try to argue that down since I only gagged him to keep him from calling for security and I left him in his office.”
“Which was still on fire?”
“Well not the office. That was very much not on fire.”
“Oh good.”
“The desk was though…”
“…”
“But I’m sure he’s fine. As I was leaving the sprinklers were going full power.”
“So you started a fire, assaulted and tied up your ex-boss and told him you were quitting?”
“I think that pretty much sums up what happened.”
“And so you contacted your lawyer, avoided the police, then proceeded to contact me and involve me as an accessory of hiding a wanted criminal?”
Dr. Preece looked at him incredulously. Her sexy appearance slowly became unkempt and exhausted as she subconsciously scratched her head and lost her calm demeanor. Whether she couldn’t mentally or emotionally handle becoming an accessory to a criminal, she pushed that out of her mind and focused on the patient. Maybe she could argue that he had some kind of nervous breakdown. They needed to get to the root of his problems otherwise a similar incident might happen again.
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“Markus. You’ve been pretty upset since before you stopped coming to our sessions. I refuse to believe that it was a simple phone call that threw you over the edge, caused you to tie your boss to his desk and set his office on fire!”
“Just the table-“
“I DON’T CARE!” Her hands were up, menacingly hanging in front of her. Clearly her body was subconsciously about to strangle him. Fortunately she caught herself, briefly adjusted her appearance before continuing in a much calmer, more collective manner. “What I meant to say, was that it didn’t matter what was on fire and what was not on fire. I’m more concerned with what triggered your, how should I say, destructive outburst. What stopped you from coming to our sessions?”
“Hmm.” Markus honestly had to think about that for a minute. It was so many months ago that he couldn’t really remember when he started losing control. “Probably…”
“Yes?”
“Probably, what caused me to snap was the final result of my divorce.”
“…you got divorced?”
“I received a summons from some jerkoff at work.”
“You were served your divorce papers while at work?”
That definitely would be an attributing factor to why he snapped at work and assaulted his boss. She made a note of it at the bottom of a page before circling it and drawing arrows from other points on the page towards it.
“Yeah, and you know how he gave me the papers? He pretended to be a new hire, just out of college, and said he needed help with a particularly bad mistake he made in the books! I should have known something was off when he had paper in his hand instead of a flash drive.” When he saw the confusion on Dr. Preece’s face he clarified. “If you printed out all the books you’d have a literal ton of paper. He wouldn’t have been able to fit anything of significance on a few sheets of paper.”
“Ah.”
He could just make out the sentence she was writing.
‘Betrayed by what he thought of as a junior/protégé. Markus always took betrayal badly.’
“So how did the divorce go?”
“Not well.” He said it with a kind of deathly acceptance. Like he suffered through the most painful experience, but now that it was over he can look back at it just be glad it’s over with.
“Are you able to talk about it?”
“Sure. That’s partly one of the reasons why I’m here today.”
Dr. Preece perked up a little as she was finally getting to the root of what brought him in today. He was wanted by the police because he burned down his office and assaulted his boss. He did that because the guy was a jerk, but also because he was emotionally stressed by the outcome of his divorce. Which he received the news of, not from his wife, but from a process server. Who betrayed his trust in order to serve him divorce papers at work. “Take it slow, and just know that I’m here for you.”
“Thanks doc-er, Olivia.”
“You’re welcome, Markus!”
“Right. Well, as I said, one day at work I received a summons to appear before a court judge. When I showed up the first thing that happened was that there was an ‘anonymous’ tip stating that I brought a weapon in order to kill a court judge.”
“Ouch. Security must have been rough.”
“They were not gentle, no. So despite being more than an hour early, I spent the next three hours locked in a room with two very large handed men. For the sake of this story let’s call them Rick and Richard.”
“Rick and Richard indeed. Interesting choice of names.”
“Quite. Well, after they had finished their business, I explained to them the purpose of my visit. They sympathized with me, and they even apologized for the whole situation.”
“Well that’s good-“
“Unfortunately the Judge didn’t believe my reason for being over an hour late.”
“Oh.”
“And that immediately set the stage for my downfall! The Judge asked if there was anything that the court should know before the lawyers brought forth the list of assets. Which apparently my wife hired a private investigator to find out everything I own! My wife said she had some to share.” Markus stuttered a little. She couldn’t determine if it was due to overwhelming anger, depression, pain or a combination of all three. “My wife, of almost 20 years, declared in the court of law. That I had beaten her, repeatedly, during our marriage.”
“What? But you would never hurt anyone!” Olivia had to admit to herself, judging by her immediate outburst to defend his character that she might be getting too close to her patient.
“And I never have! Even in terms of self-defense I have never hurt anyone. It’s just not something I’ve ever done. But of course, already being in the Judge’s bad graces, and my wife putting on a superb bit of acting, who did he believe?” He could barely swallow the bile of anger in his throat. “That’s right. He believed her.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, with the judge believing her, and my lawyer banging her-“
“Wait what?”
“He was banging her. My wife was sleeping with her lawyer and my lawyer at the same time. I hired a PI with some cash I stored in my car’s rear-view mirror. The one place her stupid PI didn’t look! She was getting double teamed by the pair of them.”
“I am so sorry Markus! That sort of evidence could get them into some serious trouble though.”
“Yep! That’s one of the few good things that came out of my divorce. I now have a prosecutor and a defense lawyer by the short and curlies! Well, having those two at my beck and call along with no longer being married to my ex-wife.”
“I’m just going to pretend that I didn’t hear about potential blackmail.” She struck-through a portion of her notes as well.
He agreed whole heartedly. “That’s probably for the best.”
“So what happened? In court I might add.”
“Well after the waterworks ended, the Judge decided that my soon-to-be ex-wife would get full custody of my daughter-“
“The one that hates you? Isn’t she 18?”
Markus had a confused smirk on his face. “I only have the one, but she’s turning 18 in a couple of months so she still falls under needing a custody hearing. And after giving custody to my wife, he then gave almost all of my assets over to her as well.”
“But I thought this was a no-fault state? Shouldn’t the assets be split down the middle, 50-50?”
“Normally yes, but it’s no longer a normal case when someone claims domestic violence. Apparently, all that she needed to do was convince the Judge, even a little bit, that her claim was real. If he believes her, AT ALL, then it’s up to his discretion to give up to 100% of the assets to the injured party.”
“No way!”
“I thought the same thing.”
“But that would just give a lot of angry divorcee’s the motive to falsely accuse their spouse of a crime!”
“I agree!”
“Wow, you learn something new every day. So the Judge gave her most of your assets. I assume that means the house, the cars…”
“All of those. Including the bank accounts, small items, some personal items… everything except for my retirement account. He also filed a restraining order against me. I’m not allowed with 500 yards of my old house or my ex-wife and daughter.”
“A restraining order? For how long?”
“Until I’m deemed safe to be around them without wanting to beat them.”
“Wow. That would definitely be what triggered your outburst; which isn’t going to help the restraining order.”
“I don’t even care at this point. I was unhappy for years with my wife. And either she raised my daughter to hate me or I screwed up somewhere along the way and now she hates me just like her mother.”
“So you’re… not happy,” she tried to find a way to help him explain how he was feeling “but… accepting of how things ended?”
“I guess I am. Though, for a moment I thought it was almost worth going through all this shit.”
“Why?”
“Well after the restraining order, and the asset division, the Judge almost made me pay alimony. Clearly this was HER doing as well since I was going to have to pay about half my wages.”
“You said ‘was’. Did you not end up having to pay alimony?”
“No alimony what so ever! At first alimony was required, but after my phone call to my lawyer today the Judge rescinded it. I thought it was because I lost my job, but as it turns out a lot of people have tried to quit in order to avoid paying alimony to their ex’s. But when the Judge heard the circumstances of my unemployment, including a more than likely pending arrest warrant, he determined that it was unlikely that I would fine a similar paying job in the future. So if I can’t support myself then I can’t afford alimony and I’d just be in and out of the jail system for the rest of my life. So, no alimony. And the look on HER face… EEEE! Priceless. Almost worth the rest of the bullshit.”
There was a small lull in the conversation at that point. It would have been a good break for a snack and drinks, but neither of them had touched the bowl of mints or water bottles on the coffee table in the room. For Dr. Preece it was because she tended to focus completely on the patient, but for Markus it was because, when he realized that he fully accepted how the divorce turned out, he had failed to remember the magazine in his lap. A slight shift had let it drop to the floor before his lightning fast movements brought it back up as a shield from curious gazes.
“Nice. Ah, g-good! I think this is good. You’re treating this like what it potentially could be. A fresh, new start.”
“A new start? What should I do?”
This was where it would normally help if she had a few more decades to experience life. She would have been able to recommend new and exciting activities or suggested spending more time with friends. Luckily Dr. Preece was an expert student and had been working as a therapist for several years already. For a man like Markus who had already spent most of his life working for others she had the perfect idea.
“Do you remember a dream you had before you took the job under that jackass? Before you got married?”
“What? You mean in my sleep?”
She went deadpan at his out of character, idiotic reply. “No. Did you ever dream of what you wanted to do with your life? Like become an astronaut or a fire fighter?”
“Sure, but it was a stupid dream.”
“It can’t be any stupider than wanting to be a unicorn. When I was 4 I wanted to be a pink horse with a horn on its head.”
Markus had to admit it, his dream really wasn’t as stupid as hers. “I wanted to be an artist.”
“Oh?” That was a pleasant surprise. One especially out of the character she had developed in her mind about him. Dr. Preece was excited to find out more. “What kind?”
“Everything really. Music, painting, drawing, carpentry scrap booking… but what I really wanted to do was write fantasy stories.”
“The kind where a princess is in need of rescue and a valiant knight comes in to rescue her?” Markus could look at the bookshelf behind her to see that she was a fan of such romantic novels. The bookshelf was overstuffed with them.
“That, and stories about monsters and beasts. Other worlds and unexplored lands. Adventures and travels. I wanted to write all kinds of stories and spread them around the world for people to read. I wanted to travel the world and get inspiration from the places I visited and the people I met. That way I could write stories that people could relate to and they’d enjoy them even more.”
“Sounds like a wonderful dream. Why not fulfill it?”
“Eh?”
“Is there a problem? From the sounds of it there’s nothing to stop you? You are no longer married, your daughter is being taken care of by her mother and you no longer have a professional responsibility to any particular company. You’re free!” She was getting more excited than him as she listed off what he didn’t need to take care of. Internally, Dr. Preece was becoming jealous of the nude man in front of her.
“Yeah, why not?” Her excitement was a storm and sweeping Markus up in its wake. “I won’t let anyone tell me what I can and cannot do. I won’t take orders and I’ll work for myself. I’ll travel the world, see the sites! Paint, sculpt, and write about my experiences. I’ll make works of art that everyone will want to read and then I’ll distribute it for free over the internet!”
In his excitement, Markus could feel the blood pumping through his veins. Blood cells were pumping adrenaline to every pore of his being, something he hadn’t felt in a long time. He wanted to scream and shout. He wanted to let out his feelings and every emotion at the same time. He wanted to let it all out, and he couldn’t do that sitting still. Without thinking about it he stood up.
“Eh? That last part might be a little too much.” Dr. Preece was keeping a level gaze straight forward. She had made her decision and didn’t bother to follow his eyes.
“Get a good long look Olivia! This is the new me!”
As he strode out of the office with confidence he could just make out “Oh, I’m looking” from behind him.
----------------------------------------
Though he was all hyped up to fulfill his teenage dream, Markus came across a slight problem. Other than the fact that it was still illegal to walk around public without any clothes on, and that the police had been looking for him while he was in session with Dr. Preece, Markus had no money.
Having lost it all in the divorce, and then subsequently losing his job, he was without cash or credit. And trips around the world cost a lot of money. Too much money for Markus to even think about in fact. Hell, when you’re broke, a trip to the next state costs too much money.
At least for the public nudity charge he had a lawyer, who was possibly corrupt, work it out to a misdemeanor. Luckily for Markus the lawyer was better at his job than he had thought. He stated to the judge that his actions were out of character due to the stress of getting divorced, losing custody of his only child and losing his job. Even though he properly did his job; if Markus had any money he wouldn’t have called the irate, stuck-up man. Anyone who had material that could be used to blackmail himself couldn’t possibly be an upstanding member of society. Still, this particular lawyer had his perks. Like the free cell phone service during their only client-attorney privilege moment.
With that one cell-phone he was able to get in touch with the legal department of the company that he no longer worked for. He then gave them a file location on his work desktop computer along with the necessary password to open it. Within ten minutes he had been passed up to the CEO’s secretary. The woman played at being a secretary though. Anyone who worked long enough in the company would know that she was really giving the orders and the actual CEO was an underqualified man who was paid a large yearly figure just to take the fall in the eventuality that the company needed a scape goat.
Luckily he must have caught her in a good mood because she sounded like her normally cold-calculated, succinct self. “What would you like in return for the contents of that file disappearing for good?”
“I’m sure you’ve been paying attention to my circumstances, especially since I burnt down a poor defenseless desk several floors below you.”
“And set off the sprinkler system, which managed to soak several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and several tons of paper.”
“I would say that I’m sorry but I’m not. Everything is the fault of that asshole.”
“Please get to the point. I’m in a meeting.”
“So, you must know that I need a few things from the company that only you can help me with. It’s a short list so I’m sure you won’t need to write this down. First, get rid of the assault charge against me.”
“Done.”
“Second, I need a little money. Not much, just something to help me get back on my feet.”
“I’ll see what we have in petty cash.”
And boom. Just like that his assault charge, which his court appointed lawyer said was going to stick no matter what, slid right out of his record. And he was going to be getting some money that he would use to replace the dreary clothes gifted to him from out of the lost and found of the police station. Markus would also need to use some of it for daily necessities, but he hoped that it would be enough for his short-term living arrangements.
He could have just given her a large number and she’d probably have gotten it, but he didn’t want to push his luck. The one thing he couldn’t do was be too greedy and force them to take countermeasures instead of just dropping the charges and paying him off.
Until the money came through and the official papers to drop the charges were stamped in triplicate, Markus was stuck in a jail cell. With nothing but time and cheap television to keep him company.
“…stuck in a dead end job? Want to explore untouched wilderness? See never before, other worldly landscapes...”
Some kind of commercial was playing on the TV right at about the time that Markus got tired of listening to a guard yell at him to stop hitting his head against the cell bars. Of course, that was after he got tired of counting the dots on the ceiling in French.
“…take part in huge epic battles… gigantic monsters… massive reward systems…”
He stopped listening to the announcer. The scenery in the commercial was beautiful. Sprawling mountains, deep ravines, ravenous monsters, quests, endless forests, big baddies… Universe Online. It was something called a virtual reality massive multiplayer online role playing game. Years had passed since he last played a game, but he was coming up with an ingenious idea.
‘I don’t have the money to travel the world. At best the company will pay me enough for a couple of plane tickets. If this virtual reality bit is as good as the commercial is hyping it up to be, maybe I could use the game as a substitute for traveling around the world? There are foreign lands that no one has ever seen before. Monsters to fight and there has to be some kind of princess quest that I could do. I don’t have to get inspiration from real experiences. And, even if it is from a game, I still really experienced it! Plus, it has to be cheaper to buy a game than to buy food and lodging as well as transportation! This could work…’