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DAY 7

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Rising from the sofa, Marcus bowed at me before leaving my office.

“And, Marcus?” I said, steepling my fingers.

The phantom lawyer stopped.

“Yes?” he asked.

Turning around, Marcus rested a hand on the mahogany bookcase up against the wall. Its shelves brimmed with classics: classics of psychiatry, psychology, neurology, and, of course, manga—loads of Kosuke Himichi works, obviously.

It is worth mentioning that the tankōbons (tankōbon being the fancy word for an individual volume of manga) glitched out every couple of seconds, their titles and covers changing in real time as I waffled over which manga to display. Catamander Brave and other Kosuke Himichi works were a given, but he wrote a lot of manga; also, there were a lot of other (lesser) authors who deserved a place on the shelf, too.

I could have fit all of them into the bookcase by willing the shelves to be some kind of spatial anomaly that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside, but I’d decided against doing so, so as to keep from weirding out my ghostly patients.

I looked the ghost in the eyes. “I’ll make sure to send your brother your way, if I find him.”

Marcus bowed his head. “Thank you, Dr. Howle. Thank you.” Then he stepped out the door and dissolved into mist.

I let myself slump against the back of my swiveling leather recliner, resting my arms on the armrests. For once, I was actually feeling rather pleased with myself and my imaginary office. All things considered, for a figment of my imagination, it was a pretty cozy set-up.

I’d always wanted to have one of those old-fashioned collegiate desks, and now, I did, here in this little space inside my mind. The wood was sumptuously varnished, exactly how I’d conjured it. A glass bowl sitting at the edge of the desk held pieces of multi-colored candy corn—fruit-flavored, augmented with a soupçon of pure serenity. The nameplate on the desk bore a description of my new profession: Genneth Howle, Neuropsychiatrist, Soul Therapist, & Afterlife Consultant. Degree Pending.

Was it a bit pompous of me? Absolutely. But, after everything I’d been through, I think I’d earned it. For once, things had actually been working out in my favor!

I could hardly believe it, myself—though it helped that I’d been keeping count. Starting with Ileene and her parents as ghosts numbers one, two, and three, respectively, Marcus was my forty-second soul; the forty-second tenant of the afterlife condominiums I’d been rapidly developing in my mind. The mind-worlds I was making for the dead were still a little on the messy side, though, so I planned on using the break between this shift and my next to go ask Greg and the others for help. There had to be a better way of organizing all this stuff, and, unfortunately, I was never any good at logistics of that sort. With me, things tended to be touch-and-go. Hopefully, the transformee self-help group would, well, help with that.

I suppose I could have streamlined the process slightly by whipping up some sort of standardized guidebook or an FAQ to distribute to the souls of the dead, but I preferred to do things on a one-on-one basis. Helping spirits come to terms with their deaths and give them the resolve and closure needed to live out an afterlife within the worlds in my head was by no means straightforward. It couldn’t be standardized, nor would I want it to be; it deserved a personal touch. Therapy was a long journey; you couldn’t do it quickly, nor could you make it on your own. Fortunately, in this one situation, we had all the time in the (mind) world, and every step of progress kept the souls from falling into the despair that Hell and the fungus would use to transfigure them into demons.

The whole “keeping literal demons at bay” thing notwithstanding, in many ways, this new work was a lot like my flesh-and-blood job had been, back before the start of the pandemic and my transformation into one of Andalon’s (or should I say &alon’s—that is, Ampersandalon’s) wyrms. Each case—each person—was a puzzle, and it was a delicate matter of coördinating myself across multiple doppelgenneths as I figured out the right approach for each patient—and, yes, I do mean multiple. If you could be in more than one place at a time, the way I could, inside my mind, it was only right that you put it to good use. Why stop at working with one patient, when you could multiply your consciousness and work with several simultaneously? So, that’s what I did; that’s what I’d been doing. I was now the conductor of a polyvalent self, simultaneously managing multiple copies of my mind-self alongside the much more familiar drudgery of manning my body back out in meat-space.

To tell the truth, it was freeing and empowering in ways that I wouldn’t have anticipated. Back when all this had begun—when Andalon first appeared to me, begging for my help—I’d had no clue how I could make good on my (initially reluctant) decision to aid her. But now, I was finally coming into my own. I was figuring out this whole wyrm business, and the feelings of success that brought were just too darn appealing for me to pass up, hence my enthusiasm for multiplying my mind-selves in order to help more than one soul at a time. It was truly a joy to be able to once again make a meaningful difference in other people’s lives, even if those lives were merely afterlives.

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Of course, like many things, it turned out to be easier said than done. It was definitely a learning experience for me, and, at times, it showed. Every now and then, while I was at work in my body making my rounds, I had to dial back on the number of spirits I was simultaneously dealing with inside my head, because I kept getting confused about who I was talking to, and which doppelgenneth I happened to be using to talk to them. Thankfully, things had gotten easier once my physical body went to sleep.

I was literally treating people in my dreams.

To my pleasant surprise, Andalon was turning out to be quite helpful. However many copies of my mental selves happened to be working at any given moment, each of them had their own imaginary office in which to receive and work with patients. Seeing me struggling to keep track of it all, Andalon had made the genuinely brilliant suggestion that I ought to give each copy of my office distinct décor, to make it easier for me to distinguish between them.

At this very moment, I was split in three—not counting my physical self. And though all of me sat at the same desk, looking at the same, ever-shifting bookcase on the wall, the various offices differed in their finer details: the color of the wallpaper, the candies in the bowl, the pattern on the carpet, the poster up on the door. Markus had been in the green room. The other two rooms were red and blue.

I managed to get ghosts 4 through 7 settled into their specially-curated afterlives within my brain over the span of about an hour of real time (this was while I was still awake) before I’d made my first attempt at working with multiple patients simultaneously. That hour had lasted a lot longer inside my head, though—one of the reasons why I’d decided to try the doppelgenneth approach.

At the risk of repeating myself, I can’t stress just how good it felt to finally have a project I could unreservedly sink my teeth into. Out in the real world, subtle changes were crawling into my behavior that had nothing to do with my wyrm transformation. It becomes harder to give a task your all when every piece of evidence and experience tells you that your efforts are in vain, doomed to be fruitless. In those situations, it’s only natural for us to distance ourselves from our work: otherwise, we’d keep giving of ourselves until there was nothing left.

So, yeah… the fight against the Green Death was not going well. That’s why working with these ghosts was so fulfilling. It gave me the opportunities for success that reality was denying us. It was like being able to walk after years spent in a wheelchair. Was I in the wrong for wanting to run as far as my legs could carry me? There was a joy in knowing the path one needed to take. It was the moment when worries could be set aside, and a man could turn all of his faculties toward the pursuit of his goal, and rack up progress like it was nobody’s business. It was a feeling I loved, and one I’d sorely missed.

Yet, in my dreams, I worried that I was in the wrong. Didn’t all of my patients deserve my fullest efforts, not simply the ones that were easiest to deal with? I tried to justify it by noting just how massive my spirit-case backlog was—it was already in the thousands—but I worried that was just a rationalization.

Then, with great circumstance, a knock rapped on the office door—the copy with the blue wallpaper.

“Mr. Genneth,” she said, “can Andalon come in now?”

“Absolutely.”

Briefly, I closed my eyes as I recomposited myself. The three rooms fused into a single office, its walls whitewashed with a pleasant beige.

Opening the door, Andalon stepped in and immediately made a run for the three bowls of candy on my desk—candy corn, chocolate truffles, and chewy mints.

As she lunged over the desk, reaching for the glass bowls, I slid them away.

She pouted at me.

I pointed over her shoulder. “Close the door, Andalon,” I said. “Remember your manners.”

Andalon darted back, closed the door behind her, and then ran back up to my desk, eyeing the candy bowls intently—particularly the chocolate truffles.

“Thank you,” I said, with a nod.

I slid the bowls over to her, and she immediately got to work stuffing her face full of chocolate truffles. Andalon really, really liked the chocolate truffles—and I couldn’t blame her for that. Heck, she deserved it.

I spun around in my chair.

Andalon’s brilliant suggestions hadn’t been limited to making the mind-offices distinct. Oh no: it had been her idea, in the first place, to build the offices in my mind. She’d thought it would be easier for me to help the ghosts she’d saved from the fungus if I could receive them and work with them somewhere near the edge of time, in a place in my mind.

“It’d be like the not-here-place,” she’d said—the not-here-place she returned to whenever she wasn’t manifesting to me.

It really had been a wonderful idea. It was only one night’s sleep into my new set-up, and I could already tell it had been a massive improvement to the “deal with them one by one, as they come” strategy that I’d before then.

This therapy quest had also gotten me thinking about medical ethics. There was a great deal of darkness in Psychiatry’s history. I could go on and on about the horrors to which we’d subjected victims of mental illness in the past, but, in the end, they were little more than myriad variations of the same underlying error: a lack of respect. A doctor dehumanized their patient the instant they stopped respecting their patient’s individuality. The moment you stopped respecting a patient, the patient turned from a person to a machine. It was the psychiatrist’s job to offer solutions, and it was the patient’s job to choose which ones—if any—they would use. Consent was paramount.

That didn’t mean treating them like they were a Lucent who could do no wrong, though.

So, did that make me a hypocrite?

Here I was, with the ability to plunge into my patients’ minds. It was the kind of thing a psychiatrist could only dream of. But there were strings attached. Yes, I could access my ghosts’ memories and experience them like real life, but my ability to do so was at least partially dependent on the ghosts’ attitudes. When they were angry or uncooperative, only their “loudest” memories would be within easy reach: their obsessions, their biggest traumas, their greatest triumphs. As long as they remained unwilling, accessing anything deeper than that would required more of a… push. I could access the memories if I really set my mind to it, but not without consequences, and even then, there was no predicting how it might work. Sometimes, they came out fine. Other times, not so much. There’d be personality changes, sometimes even loss of their sense of self to one degree or another. Andalon told me it was only temporary, and, while I didn’t doubt her, of all the handful of spirits that had fallen apart after I’d pressed harder than I should have, none of them had snapped back to normal, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that it would be a long time before that ever happened.

This knowledge did not leave a pleasant taste in my mouth.