The House of Love

The birds’ chirping in the Japanese-style garden outside the clinic was nearly the only thing which could calm Tyler down. No doubt he was finding this two-hour therapy session extremely tedious. Reclining on the leather couch, he could barely look the doctor in the eyes as he talked; and was secretly, vehemently scratching one of his thumbs against bent fingers to alleviate the tension.

The topic was too sensitive.

“Are you listening to me, Mr. Anderson?”

The aged, bespectacled man with a dapper beard was turning the pages of some notebook at his computer desk. It was an unusually warm spring evening, and the air in the office was stifling, almost tangibly electrified.

“Yes.” For the first time in minutes, Tyler turned to the doctor. “You emphasized the need of curative hypnosis.”

“Exactly. Let me explain the situation one more time. Having studied your file, I came to realization that your problem, Mr. Anderson, is almost purely mental, and has hardly anything to do with your physical state. What happened to you happens extremely rarely, but still does. Ever since your wife left you, somewhere in the deeper layers of your psyche you might have decided…”

He paused, which made Tyler even more nervous.

“…that you became, in a certain way, not good enough for other people to love you. However naïve it sounds, it might be the cause of the dysfunction.”

“Whatever, Doc. Seriously. If you could only know how tired I am of different assumptions which don’t lead anywhere. How many times I believed that the issue was identified and would soon be treated? Pills, surgeons, yoga teachers… but no results ever.”

“I understand your point.”

“My case is not just the inability to deal with women. It’s impossible to describe how much my social life, self-image, everything changed. I feel like a stunted tree which was cut down. And I’m only thirty-five.”

The doctor approached Tyler with a cup of water.

“That’s exactly why I’m offering you my new experimental method. Consider it your last resort.”

Tyler drank, his hand trembling. He finally rose from his position and said:

“What’s so special about your hypnosis, then?”

“Nothing, from a general standpoint. I’m going to put you in a sort of trance, just for a short while, and will safely wake you up after. The purpose of your journey, though, can sound a bit unusual. You will need to find and enter the realm of your inner sexuality, to get all the answers.”

“Enter my… sexuality?”

“Oh, dear Mr. Anderson.” The doctor sat on the sofa to his right. “You may think now about some BDSM dungeons, mass orgies or school crushes, but I guess all that is just the effect of porn and pop culture. We see sexuality here as something more universal and almost philosophical. Look at those birds in the garden. What are they are singing about? The trees are in bloom. Every single living being on earth has this realm within it, and so do you. There’s nothing necessarily nasty about it.”

“Okay. What specifically will I have to do then?”

“As I said, find and enter this hidden kingdom of your mind. Become an Alice in the Wonderland-of-Sex. All I need is your consent for the procedure.”

In any other situation Tyler would have definitely denied such a vague offer. But now, when all the other means were exhausted…

“I agree,” he said desperately. “Do whatever you want, but help me.”

“You won’t be disappointed, Mr. Anderson.” The doctor returned to his table. Tyler expected him next to take some pendulum or something like that for hypnosis, but he actually remained still. He was not flipping pages or looking at the monitor anymore, but only into Tyler’s eyes.

“I want you to follow the white rabbit now,” he said.

“What? Which one?”

The next moment someone knocked the door and then opened it. Tyler couldn’t even enjoy the breeze of the fresh air, as he was immediately perplexed. There was no one behind the door. Something, however, surely entered the room. It soon became visible that it was a real-life puffy white rabbit which started to circle around the doctor’s desk.

“Some symbols are so overused that they become archetypes,” he commented.

“Is it for real? Has the hypnosis already started?”

But this time the doctor ignored his question. Tyler stood up and started to search for the rabbit. After a few seconds they were gazing at each other in the center of the room.

“I won’t tell you anything till the end of the session. Otherwise, there will be no effect.”

Tyler swallowed a lump. It was astonishing to realize that he was already within a dream. Even more peculiar was the fact that the transition happened so quickly and remained completely unnoticed. He cast a last anxious glance at the doctor. The bespectacled old man was silently, almost ominously sitting in his chair and watching.

That reminded Tyler of his real issue, and why he came here.

“Well, so be it…”

He stepped toward the rabbit, and the little creature jerked and bolted outside, which was rather expected. Tyler left the room in pursuit. He saw the uncanny creature at the end of an empty corridor, almost beckoning for him to come. Immediately he advanced and approached it, but when he was about to catch the animal, it twitched again and was gone. Tyler started to chase it down all the corridors, veering left and right within the unfamiliar building, but the rabbit remained always ahead of him.

At some point he understood that he was lost. And the naughty little one slipped through a white door of another office room just before his eyes. Was it all just a part of the dream too? He entered the doorway, prepared to either start excusing himself or to finally catch the rabbit, but instead... he abruptly fell down.

What actually awaited poor Tyler behind that door was hard to describe without attributing to it a certain nightmarish quality. After he crossed the threshold, the clinic itself vanished as if it had never existed, and he collapsed into some impenetrable dark tube with sleek surfaces—a strange chute he could only perceive by touch. Screaming, he slid down this chute with incredible speed. Though it reminded him somewhat of a water slide, it lacked the promise of a safe landing. In a brief moment nothing more remained of the rabbit, the doctor, and seemingly his past life itself; there was only the descent.

After his scream—and strength—were exhausted, the chute eventually hurled him out onto some rocky ground with extreme force. For some time he did not move, petrified by the fear that his bones could have been broken. But that didn’t prove to be true. Surprisingly intact from his fall, Tyler cautiously stood up and looked around with frightened awe.

He found himself on the top of some ash-covered hill surrounded by an unfamiliar, seemingly abandoned city. Dark grey in color, it lay vast under heavy, brewing clouds which were about to give birth to a sudden thunderstorm. Innumerable decrepit buildings, old-fashioned and somewhat gothic, surrounded him from all sides, and were also present on the hill. Waving away ash particles in the air, Tyler turned to a house behind his back, as that was the direction he presumably took flying from the mysterious chute.

The house looked gigantic and seemed on the brink of toppling down. Its narrow façade pilasters were crooked in a shape beyond imagination, and the edges of its gable’s roof, along with two windows on top, reminded him of an upside-down menacing smile. Most importantly, the building had a small downpipe which was tilted downward at roughly the same angle Tyler had fallen. How could he get here from such a narrow hole?

And what was this city, which definitely didn’t look like his “Wonderland-of-Sex?”

He moved down the hill. Everywhere he looked he saw the same buildings of impossible shapes covered in ashes. Some had broken roofs, while others looked more or less livable, but all of them were similarly humongous and abandoned. For a moment he felt that all this could have left a strong impression on him as an aspiring writer, but only if it hadn’t been so frightening. If only he could have been a little more brave…

All that inevitably brought him again to what he came here for, his sensitive problem. He thought about his ex-wife—soft, caring Mary, whose twinkling laugh seemed like a rain on the trees’ leaves on a sunny day. He recalled her irrational preference for the color grey, the clothing of the fifties, her unique smell—unobtrusively ashy with notes of musk. How she waited for years for Tyler’s authorial success, for which he was ready to sacrifice everything. When they had to sell some of their heirlooms and car, she didn’t say anything. When they had to eventually sell their house, it was a turning point. Every day Mary had grown more and more anxious, her familiar, darling features beginning to look alien and almost menacing in the endlessness of their last nights. She left him suddenly, on a murky day when the sky was heavy with promised rain, but never let go. That day she officially chose him: a white-washed, put-together engineering graduate with veneers, a man who knew how to live. What a tasteless, trite and altogether painful choice.

But what was this land of ashes and abandoned buildings after all?

The lead-laden sky above Tyler’s head had finally given way to a relieving lightning, followed by thunder and the first drops of rain. For some reason he had become really afraid of getting wet in this mysterious place. But even more sinister to him were these monstrous buildings, which he would never dare to enter in search of shelter. He started to run along the ashy street, while the rain gradually became a downpour.

Just like in the clinic, he began turning right and left in search of a place to hide, but nevertheless bumped into it quite unexpectedly. It was a house unlike any other: much smaller than the rest and with ebony-colored walls. It stood not along the street but just on the road, in the very middle of it. Some inner voice told Tyler to enter it, and he did.

He couldn’t believe his eyes. The interior of the house, every piece of the furniture, doors, and chandeliers were made of wasted paper with words on it. “It’s not a building, but a book. The black book!” he exclaimed, and with a sardonic laugh he trudged through the paper, which was getting wet and beginning to fall apart. He recognized these papers instantly—his last chance to save his marriage a year ago by proving that he wasn’t a worthless author. Write a story for money, a story about someone who unexpectedly finds $20,000, including a little black book. He remembered how he felt, running up against the word limit, rewriting his ideas time after time. Walls and sofas around him were made of different “Mr. Jacksons” and “Miss Gilberts” who “woke up to an unexpected knock and found a strange black book on their porch,” and countless such variations.

He ascended to the second floor, the words on the pages growing scarcer with each step. It was nearly empty, a single room with a tiny window providing dim light, not from the gloomy street but apparently from some place unknown. In the center of the room covered with only blank paper, Tyler nearly missed the small white envelope resting on the floor, marked with his name in neat script.

He opened it. Inside was a check—$20,000.

“Was that the idea of therapy, Doc? Finding my inner worth in a metaphorical sense?”

Thunder rumbled outside again, a sign of a new, hopeful beginning.

“Wake up, Mr. Anderson.”