October '25: 'Something New'

This October blogpost brings with it a previously unpublished short story, 'Something New', embedded in the body text below and downloadable at the bottom of the post as .epub and .kepub files, as well as some thoughts on the story and whether it borrows a little too much from a story by a writer I greatly admire. The title already carries certain ironies within my story's own logic; the question of influence, of borrowing, adds another.

i. Local History

My mother was a Masters student in Local History at the local polytechnic when I went to the nursery located at the back of the campus off the long Lewes Road into Brighton. That nursery and its on-campus successors have since been shuttered by subsequent administrations, and in 1992 the poly became a University, but between 1988 and 1990 it enabled my mother to study as a mature student with children. I would myself pursue an M.A. in Photography at the same, much changed institution, between 2013 and 2015, following which I would get a job as a Technical Instructor across the Photography courses.

One of my dominant memories from nursery is the walk home afterwards, tramping on the fallen leaves as they turned to mulch along the Lewes Road, towards our house up on Kimberley Road. It always felt like such a long walk. You think such things go on forever.

October brings the fall of leaves and the start of term. The movement of millions of young people across the country always carries with it new respiratory infections; I had a Covid booster and a flu jab the other Friday, hoping to ride out any side effects over the weekend before work the next week, but fell ill with a cold on the Monday in any case. Workshop inductions began a few weeks ago, and I delivered the first of my sessions (Intro to Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, if you were wondering) last Tuesday.

I say all this by way of introduction to the short story that will make up the bulk of this post.

The story is set at a University, and concerns a parent and their child. It is not, I should add, about the Polytechnic whose nursery I attended as a toddler; nor is it about my parents or my own self as a child, although it makes use of psychoanalsyis, a discourse that might question such claims. It’s about repetition, among other things, and one issue I have with it, as mentioned, is that I think the central conceit owes a little too much to a story by another writer, which I’ll turn to at the end of this post. I’ve spoken to a couple of editors who passed on the story, and the resemblance didn’t seem to them a problem, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sort of bother me. In a way, it’s quite appropriate to the story.

I’m retiring this one from the Rejection Carousel to post it here, at least as far as first publication rights go. I can’t quite decide what I make of it: I like it a lot, but I’m not entirely sure it works... although I’m increasingly interested in the idea of fictions, or artworks, that somehow don’t work. (What does it mean for an artwork to work? What work does an artwork perform, or fail to perform?) Not that that’s an excuse.

In the current arrangement of my second book of stories, Flume, this story brings the collection to a close. Its title echoes the opening story of my first collection (‘New to it All’). Should anyone have any thoughts on it, I’d love to hear them.

Anyway, here it is.

II. SOMETHING NEW

‘We have something new I thought we might try,’ said Elin’s therapist. ‘If it interests you.’

‘Okay,’ said Elin, looking up. ‘What’s that?’

Her therapist gazed at her.

So now Elin had two therapists: her waking-therapist and her dreaming-therapist.

‘The problem,’ Elin had said, ‘is that I often feel fine when we meet. It’s always 12 o’clock, Monday or Friday. I’m usually awake by then. And talking to you, in talking, I always start to feel normal. In talking you have to put things in order and putting things in order is very soothing, I think, but the things you put in order, at the time, are never in any such order at all. So I can’t talk about anything without making a lie out of it. When at night…’

Trailing off, she looked down at the floor.

She sniffed.

‘At night,’ Elin said, looking up. ‘When I start to nod off…’

‘The clinic,’ her therapist had said, ‘likes to innovate. It has a reputation, of which it is perhaps a little too fond, for cutting-edge research. And of course it’s a part of the University.’

Elin was a student at the University, on a bursary. She wouldn’t have been able to afford five minutes in its library otherwise. The Wellbeing package, of which the therapy was a part, came at a steep discount, and because Elin had consented to participation in the clinic’s research – the sessions would be recorded, analysed, and archived for future analysis – a further reduction had been applied. It was not an inexpensive university. She had completed Practice I in her first year. Practice II would begin in the spring. She was top of her class in every module. She felt as though she was failing every one of them. Her mother had studied here, twenty years before. Her mother had dropped out, laden with debt. Elin knew this. Now catastrophe stalked her, day and night.

‘At night?’ her therapist asked.

‘It is the stage between waking and sleeping,’ said the therapist. ‘Hypnagogia. One loosens up. It is a fertile state. With the medication – technically, it’s not a medication – we can prolong that state.’

‘The crown—’ they pointed at the little latex mesh, studded with sensors, like a peculiarly jewelled swimming cap ‘—is not uncomfortable.’

There were various add-ons, additional modules, optional extras: Transference and Countertransference; Somatic Interventions; Nonsense Rituals; Estrangements and Displacements; Negative Capabilities.

The therapist gave her a brochure.

‘There is some small print,’ they said. ‘Read the small print.’

Elin looked up, surprised, then chuckled. ‘That was one of my mother’s favorite sayings,’ she said. ‘Always read the small print!’

Elin rolled her eyes.

The dream-therapist sat in the corner of her room. They didn’t fidget. They didn’t appear to breathe. They were slightly smaller than the waking-therapist.

Listening to the dream-therapist, Elin tried to work out what it was that seemed so off about them. She thought she had it: it was, she decided, a question of signal and noise. Or rather it was a question of the total lack of noise. When the dream-therapist spoke, it was all signal: no breathing, no licking of the lips, no swallowing, none of the soft wet sputtering of a real mouth, nor any shifting in their chair. Just words, in an immaculate clone of the waking-therapist’s voice, expressed in the same remote register, following the same careful rhythms.

Is something wrong? asked the dream-therapist.

Perhaps if you sit over there, said Elin.

Okay, said the dream-therapist, standing, turning, lifting the chair. It was a basket chair – it had belonged to Elin’s mother. The dream-therapist placed the chair in the spot at which Elin had pointed, then sat back down. Whenever the dream-therapist sat down, the chair did not creak.

No, said Elin, turning away, swinging her legs around so as to sit up at the side of her bed. She ran her hands over her belly. It felt engorged. Often in her dreams Elin would realise she was pregnant.

The dream-therapist stood to their feet.

Elin felt a yearning, then, as she gazed at the dream-therapist, simultaneously distant, as if remembered, or as if it were a yearning in the heart of some fictional character depicted on a television screen, and close, in her mouth, her groin, her fingertips.

No, she said. Her frustration welled up. It isn’t working. It isn’t working.

What about this? the dream-therapist said, standing at the foot of the bed. The dream-therapist took a step back, and then a second step back. Then they took a third step back—

—which was also a step up, onto the wall, except it did not seem so much as if the therapist, in taking a step back, had stepped up onto the wall, but as if the room instead had rotated and she, Elin, was now perpendicular to the floor, that the floor of the room was perpendicular to the true floor. Elin had not realised that what she had taken to be the true floor was only an apparent floor.

Panicked, she swung herself back onto the bed, where she lay flat, gripping the edges of the mattress as if the mattress might secure her into place.

The dream-therapist stepped back again: six steps, for it was a small room, back and then up—

—and again the room rotated, and the dream-therapist, who in a smooth stride simultaneous with the rotation had stepped forward, into the centre of the room, appeared now to hang directly above Elin, who in turn felt herself to hang directly above the dream-therapist.

Hanging so, they regarded one another.

Perhaps, said the dream-therapist, in their smooth noiseless voice, this might work? It’s okay if you need to take a minute.

Elin, settling, took a minute.

You were thinking about your mother, said the dream-therapist.

The comment startled Elin, but the startlement might have belonged to someone else. Her emotions in this space, Elin had found, were like so much conversation overheard from next door. You miss the detail but catch the mood, the tone. She quickly found herself adjusting to the new therapeutic dynamic: as a figure in her dream, the dream-therapist had access, of a sorts, to what Elin was thinking. Which made Elin wonder why the dream-therapist asked questions at all, if they already knew the answer. She supposed it was do with the process. Whenever Elin didn’t understand something, that was what she told herself. Go with the process. Because nothing else had worked. So she went with it.

Elin nodded.

You said she was a student here, too.

Yes, said Elin. She dropped out.

What did she study?

She was studying Psychotherapy, said Elin, chuckling with a depth of hopelessness that surprised her. She wanted to be a therapist.

The dream-therapist nodded.

She was a brilliant student. I grew up, I think, in the shadow of her brilliance. And in the shadow of her failure.

And now you are a brilliant student.

Elin shrugged.

It’s true, said her therapist. I have access to your files. I’ve seen your grades. Do you not believe it?

I don’t know.

Her dream-therapist waited. It was a tactic both the waking and the dream-therapist deployed, Elin had learned, as she had grown accustomed to the therapeutic process. It functioned as a prompt. Sometimes she decided to wait it out, and the therapist, the waking-therapist, would change tack. But Elin had found that you couldn’t wait out the dream-therapist: the dream-therapist was content to sit forever, holding your gaze, awaiting your move. Perhaps if you waited forever, Elin wondered, you would never wake up.

I don’t know, Elin said at last. Do you ever feel as if your life has already been written out for you? she asked.

The dream-therapist, hanging above her, sitting below her, smiled.

That day, on the ninth floor of the library, beside the glass balcony overlooking the drop down to the hard tiles of the foyer, Elin felt the world rotate. The floor, the ninth floor, was not the true floor; she felt the building shift, as it had shifted in her dream. She gripped the rail as if it might secure her into place. She overlooked the drop. She thought about the hard tiles. She thought about them a lot.

She thought about her mother.

‘You know,’ said the waking-therapist, in one of the lulls, one of the silences that Elin, listless today, had decided to wait out, ‘I visited the archives yesterday afternoon.’

Elin nodded.

‘The archives are vast. Particularly significant are the case studies. There’s a lot of material.’

Elin looked up. Something occurred to her.

‘I have a question,’ she said.

‘Yes?’

‘How long have you worked here?’

‘Twenty-five years.’

Elin nodded.

‘Did you read the small print?’

Elin nodded.

‘So did your mother.’

‘I know.’

The waking-therapist nodded.

Elin frowned. Something, she wasn’t yet sure what, had struck her. Something about the therapist.

‘Would you prefer not to talk about this?’

‘It’s not that,’ said Elin, who had never been very good at concealing her emotions, annoyed at herself for frowning so conspicuously.

‘I can, if you like, request access to your mother’s files.’

Elin nodded.

‘Would you like that?’

‘I don’t know.’

The therapist nodded.

Elin tilted her head. It had come to her. The therapist looked different.

‘When you’re ready,’ said the therapist. ‘If you want to.’

Elin was nodding, but she was thinking something else. She was thinking that the waking-therapist looked a little smaller today.

A suicide leaves a host of unanswerable questions. When her mother’s body hit the cold hard tiles, Elin wondered, did the cold hard tiles also rise to meet her mother?

She had dropped out, already pregnant with Elin. Eight years had passed. Why, Elin wanted to know, did she go back? She had snuck into the library. She had browsed the shelves. She had taken the lift to the topmost floor.

I think, said Elin, she was returning to the scene of her failure. But did she go to do what she did, or something else? Had she planned it, or was it just, you know, the opportunity…

The dream-therapist waited. Something else Elin had spotted: the dream-therapist did not blink.

Elin had not noticed the projector before, but it must have been there all along: it wasn’t a temporary rig, but permanently installed upside down on the ceiling, and beneath it an old metal cabinet housed a variety of units. Elin recognised disk drives, cassette players, USB ports, and a VHS slot. Dots of blue light glowed like little eyes. There were brand names she did not recognise: CLARITY; DISCLOSURE; EPIPHIONIC. Black-out tape masked the windows: the room was dark except for a small table lamp on a side unit in the corner. The round eye of the projector lens lit up. Elin, temporarily blinded, averted her gaze. Concealed little motors began to quietly whir and a gigantic screen, almost as wide as the wall it covered and held taut by a system of tabs on each side, began to descend from a narrow slot in the ceiling she had not noticed before.

Recessed into the plaster of the ceiling an inch in front of that slot, the camera’s eye regarded her. All along she had known it was there – she had signed the consent forms – but at some point it had withdrawn from her awareness. All around her Elin was conscious now of similar little machines ticking into life, though of what and where they were she was not sure. She felt ensconced in a system of apparatuses: the room, the building, was an assemblage of apparatuses. She felt a tremendous sense of tiredness press down on her body. She blinked a few times, tired eyelids grown heavy.

The waking-therapist knocked gently on the door and then entered, apologising for the delay. She held a box containing a dozen or so videotapes, which she took to the cabinet. There was a handwritten label on the box but Elin could not read it. The waking-therapist crouched down and began to fiddle with the machines. 

These should have been digitised by now, said the waking-therapist. 

Elin, settling in her chair, heard the old familiar sound of a video player draw a tape into its maw. Mechanical components adjusted themselves and the tape began to roll. The waking-therapist paused it.

Are you sure you are ready? they asked in a smooth noiseless voice.

Yes, said Elin.

With the press of a button and the clunk and grind of components, the tape began to play.

The image displayed the room, doubled back on itself. There, Elin saw, was the same chair in which she fretted and lounged and slumped during her sessions with the waking-therapist, and behind it, up on the ceiling, clung a projector not unalike the projector positioned behind her in the room. For a moment Elin wasn’t sure if the image was moving; then, after a small delay, came the sound of a door opening.

Elin gasped: her mother. It was one thing to know that she would see her mother on the tape but quite another to actually see her. Her mother looked so young. And she looked so much like Elin that, watching her now, Elin felt a wave of discombobulation pass through her. The very picture, as her grandmother used to say. The very picture, thought Elin.

She rubbed her eyes.

Her mother hesitated a moment in the centre of the room, then appeared to notice the camera. She smiled quickly and then looked away. She fretted a moment and then sat down in the chair. She stared at the camera.

She must be my age, said Elin. She looks so young.

The double of the door of the room on the screen opened and her mother’s therapist entered.

‘Apologies for the delay,’ they said.

You look the same, said Elin. You haven’t aged.

On the screen her mother did not speak. For a long moment she sat very still. Then she shifted in the chair. She looked up at the therapist, the therapist in the video.

‘Do you ever feel as if your life has already been written out for you?’ she asked. ‘As if you were condemned to follow some template of which you were only very dimly aware?’

The video-therapist gazed back at her mother.

‘Actually, don’t answer that,’ said Elin’s mother.

The video-therapist smiled. ‘Okay,’ they said, in a smooth and noiseless voice.

Elin’s mother sniffed.

‘We have something new I thought we might try,’ said the video-therapist. ‘If it interests you.’

‘Okay,’ said Elin’s mother, looking up. ‘What’s that?’

II. Postscript

The aforementioned story ‘Something New’ resembles (or, perhaps, repeats) is ‘Born Stillborn’ by Brian Evenson. Evenson’s story features a night therapist and a day therapist. I think I was halfway into ‘Something New’ before I recognised the influence; I might have stopped writing then, but I don’t think I had anything else on the go at the time, so instead decided to finish it. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about psychoanalysis, something that had long interested me but which has taken on a new salience over the last few years as I’ve pursued psychodynamic counselling for the depression my falling ill with ME/CFS in late 2021 unleashed, and of course psychoanalysis has an enduring connection to the night side of ourselves. It was these interests to which I initially attributed the inspiration for this story. I think I’d read ‘Born Stillborn’ about a year before I wrote ‘Something New’.

As will be clear, I haven’t resolved, for myself, whether ‘Something New’ tips into plaigarism, even if the fact that I’ve gone on about it at length suggests a guilty conscience. I think it falls short of that, though it would hover somewhere above mere resemblance if we were to plot the range of potential influence from 0, i.e. absolutely none at all, to total immitations that belong in the realm of artistic forgeries at 100.

What is obvious, of course, is that it would be foolhardy for someone to establish a comparison between their own work and Evenson’s, as I appear to have done. Perhaps this is the source of my anxiety: that ‘Something New’ will remind people of something better…

In any case, there’s a wonderful reading by Evenson of ‘Born Stillborn’, recorded at Bard College back in 2015, online at Conjunctions here, which I highly recommend.

*

Here are the epub and kepub files: