I first sought out J.R.’s services at the urging of my girlfriend Katie. To this day, my memory of those pivotal moments remains surprisingly lucid, more so considering the raggedy state of my life at the time. Weeks earlier, I’d lost my driver’s license and thus was forced to Uber to J.R.’s clinic, just off the 405 in Portland in a one-story brick building, a business center of the sort that rented space at daily, even hourly, rates: unattended reception, vacant offices partitioned by laminated chipboard, and so on. Down the winding corridor, behind the last glass door on the right, I found J.R. standing in stocking-feet, lowering the room’s single plain beige windowblind. His whole vibe was that of a well-traveled soul, kind and cavalier—dark socks, sport coat, beaded necklace, salt-and-pepper beard. At his request, I slipped off my shoes and padded across the cold polyester carpeting to sit on the divan, near the end table where a black cone of incense burned. Only then did I notice J.R. was holding a bright green apple.
“It’s Daniel, isn’t it? Tell me, Daniel, what have I got here?”
According to the business card Katie had given me, J.R. specialized in “experimental intersubjectivity and self-knowledge therapy,” but both she and I had been stumped as to what that meant. Apparently, it entailed fruit.
“An apple?” I said.
J.R. waggled his eyebrows and smiled at my perplexity with small white teeth. His tone was bright and didactic as he continued. “And what three things do we know about this apple? Rock-bottom basics. I mean, you see the apple, first of all. You’re aware of its existence. Secondly, you’re aware that I too am aware, aren’t you? And finally, of course, things like size, shape, and color. Specific visual information about the apple. The problem, you see, vis a vis our knowledge of this apple is, it’s perspective-specific. From where you’re sitting, the apple looks green, the light shines on it just so. But from where I’m sitting? Or if I’m colorblind? Now imagine we’re talking about emotional, rather than visual, information. What about my feelings toward the apple, Daniel? Would you have any way of experiencing those directly?”
I pulled my feet up into a defensive criss-cross position on the divan and squirmed a little. The answers to all these questions seemed obvious, distressingly so. Where exactly was he going with this?
I needed a drink, bad.
Remember Katie, I told myself. You’re doing this for Katie.
“I guess I probably wouldn’t,” I said.
“And how could you? Your own awareness and attentional state affect each other in a positive feedback loop, but to someone else’s attentional state or awareness, we have no access. All we can do is construct a model in which no such feedback loop exists—or can we?”
J.R. joined me on the divan and eased an arm around my shoulder. His hand grazed the nape of my neck.
“Allow me to demonstrate,” he said.
Before I could protest, something in my skull went click.
“There,” he whispered. “We’ve closed the loop.”
I could hear him, but not reply. My jaw, along with every other muscle in my body, had gone slack. I felt a brief, distant tickle as J.R.’s fingers fiddled at the base of my skull. “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” he said.
The sound of an old film projector rattled to life between my ears. Cones of light shot forth from my eyesockets and onto the beige window blind.
Inside a bright, flickering rectangle I saw myself, splayed semi-conscious across the backmost booth in the diviest of Portland’s dives. Then Katie appeared—a figure in white, a pantsuited angel—scooping me up, escorting me to the backseat of her lightly pre-owned hybrid.
Much had changed since I followed Katie out west. She had safely traversed the path from quirky college-radio DJ to overworked public advocacy intern, but I had strayed far the hell afield. Before the move, I’d had my act together. Work hard, play hard, had been the motto, but at least that had involved genuine hard work. Now, I was unemployed, far from family and friends, and had drifted deep into the easiest vice I could find.
Katie’s car stopped at a red light inside the rectangle on the window blind. A facsimile of her voice resonated out of my larynx and into the cozy acoustics of J.R.’s office.
There’s this guy from the Wellness initiative at work. A friend of mine. Says he can help us. Help you.
Airing out my personal stuff with your work friends again, are we?
And asmy image on the windowblind mouthed these words, a large moist Rorschach blossomed over its crotch.
Katie’s noble, dewy brown eyes watched from the rearview, and for a moment I glimpsed myself—the me drooling on J.R.’s divan with light beaming out of my eyesockets—reflected in their limpid surface. My reflection, reflecting in the reflection of her eyes, reflected in the rearview.
Is that not OK? she asked. Am I, like, not allowed to have conversations about the people who are important to me?
It was OK. It was perfectly OK.
J.R.’s fingers clicked out of my skullholes. The lights on the window blind winked out; the rattle in my head went silent. Slowly, my faculties of speech returned, but when I tried to express the full depth of my amazement and consternation all I could say was, “That’s bonkers.”
“It’s a start,” J.R. said.
•••
The second time J.R. stuck his fingers in my skullholes, I was a contestant on some dreamworld analogue of Top Chef, with Katie as judge.
The challenge at hand involved a creature called a ‘beardbowel’ as the main ingredient. They wheeled out a scuffed-up plastic bucket and inside, sure enough, was one live ‘beardbowel’—a green lobster whose thorax resembled a pickle, with mini-gherkins for the pincers and sliced black olives for eyes. I butchered the crustacean sloppily, breaded it up, fried it, and served it on a bed of wilted greens.
My lips dribbled saliva as Katie’s voice echoed up and out of my throat.
Not bad, she said.
But at this point in the competition, we expected something more.
Afterwards, J.R. blew on his fingers like a smoking pistol.
“Disappointment,” he said. “How does that word resonate with you?”
I just sat there rubbing the invisible holes on the back of my neck, feeling weirdly stung by dreamworld Katie’s assessment of my efforts. Again, the answer was obvious. Who in Katie’s position would not be disappointed with me? Was that not why I was here in the first place?
“I don’t know,” I said, eager to change the subject. “What about the ‘beardbowel’ thing? What do you reckon that’s all about?”
“Oh, it happens. The realms of the mind contain myriad untold vistas, et cetera. Tell me, out of curiosity, have you been watching many competitive cooking shows recently?”
I had not, I said. I mainly watched comedy programs about the President. J.R. took my hand and gently led it towards the nape of his neck.
“Whoa, okay,” I said. “You sure about this?”
J.R. smiled his small-toothed grin. “Positive,” he said.
Undetectable to the eye but not to the hand, there they were: a pair of holes like a bowling ball minus the thumb, spaced to comfortably accommodate two fingers. It was not J.R.’s body my index and middle slid into, not a corporeal form of slime and bone, but instead some parallel, otherworldly interior, cool and tingly to the touch. They had nearly passed the second knuckle when J.R. pulled away.
“Not here, not me. With Katie.”
That night, I explained the basics as best I could, sweating and stammering, doubtful Katie would go along. But she did more than go along with it, she positively flung herself upon the idea. There were boundaries, of course. Certain things, J.R. had warned, were explicitly off-limits: no capturing video of projections, no blabbing the secrets to the uninitiated. There were, however, no specific injunctions against what Katie and I would do that night.
The problem, you see, was that our walls were too cluttered, all flowery wallpaper and fliers for ancient hardcore gigs blue-tacked here and there. There was no decent space to project, and so the idea occurred to me that I could turn the two cones of Katie’s light towards me, and mine towards her. What more ideal canvas, the unspoken logic went, than your own lover’s brain?
And so, we ended up naked, face to face, beams of light streaming into and out of each other’s skulls.
We were transported to a picnic table in the park with some old friends, eating cold soup out of cans with the sharp-edged metal lids sticking up. Memories of a simpler time back home, fuzzy and sepia-toned, strained through the colander of the unconscious—a long-ago Sunday with the spiky-haired Food Not Bombs crew, hitting up grocers and eateries for unsold food to cook and serve to unhoused folks in the park. The Sunday in question did not stand out in my mind, but the image made sense—or did, at least, until J.R.’s huge, bearded face appeared in the sky.
And the picnic table dissolved.
And our friends.
And me, until it was just Katie superimposed on J.R.’s face.
And then J.R. alone, an extreme close-up edging ever closer till his face encompassed all we could see. His jaws opened and closed, small teeth chomping, a dark aperture yawning above us. Swallowing us.
I yanked out my fingers.
“Hey,” Katie said, panting. “Why’d you stop? Is everything OK?”
It was not OK.
•••
I went to my third appointment a few days later, riddled with doubts. The man who was helping bring Katie and I back together was also now intruding upon our shared memories, an inexplicable presence looming amid our mental sky. Bit by bit, though, my misgivings withered to nothing as I explained each absurd and far-fetched detail of the shared vision. Afterwards J.R. sat resting his jaw on his knuckles and flicking his bottom lip with his pinky finger. I unwrapped a Starlite mint from the dish on his desk, popped it in my mouth, and awaited the verdict.
“It’s curious, I’ll give you that,” he said at length. “But distortions of this type are fairly typical when you’re dealing with double-loop closure. By that, I mean direct and simultaneous experience of each other’s awareness and attentional states. Remember our apple? You and Katie were both seeing the apple from a shared perspective, as it were.”
Pensively, I shifted the peppermint disk from one side of my mouth to the other. “Have you ever done it? A double loop closure or whatever?”
“Indeed, I have. No mean feat, honestly, for a novice like yourself.” J.R. squirted hand sanitizer on his fingers and dried them with a handkerchief. “I’m happy for you. For you both.”
I came home that night eager to share what I’d learned with Katie.
I was instead greeted by a woman with a lime green buzzcut and a shiny silver nosering, sitting on our sofa with her fingers in my girlfriend’s skullholes and vice versa.
If they noticed me come in, they didn’t show it, and for the briefest moment, I watched them and mentally ran through the process of turning around, walking out, and starting a new life never to return. Before I could get that far, the two decoupled, giggling.
“Oh my God, hey!” Katie said. “Is it that time already? Hang on.”
She excused herself and left me with her green-haired companion. I fixed my face in as friendly a configuration as possible, and we made a few seconds of valiant chitchat about the weather (good), her name (Talia), hometown (outside of Chicago), all the while sidestepping the fact she’d just been knuckle-deep in my girlfriend’s innermost mindscape.
Katie came back and handed Talia an envelope. I escaped to the kitchen, grabbed a can of seltzer from the fridge, cracked it open, pretended it was a beer, and drained half of it in one ice-cold gulp. Elsewhere, there was movement and mumbling. The front door creaked and quietly shut. I went to the living room and switched on the TV. My comedy program about the President was on. I switched it off. A few minutes later, Katie joined me on the sofa.
“So, what’d you think of Talia?” she said. “Found her on Craigslist, of all places. Crazy, right?”
“I’m not sure what to think,” I said.
“Hey, it’s not like that. If that’s what you mean.” Her lips brushed my cheek, and I could smell how the other woman’s patchouli aroma still clung to her. “I’m sorry. I was going to tell you, scout’s honor I was.”
The idea of the skullholes fascinated her, she explained, and our first experiences had enamored her so thoroughly she began to wonder: were there female practitioners, experts like J.R.? What role did gender dynamics play in this therapeutic context, how did they affect the process and the outcomes? She’d asked J.R. via email but he said only a select few people even knew the technique, and no women in the area that he was aware of. But she did some digging, lurked on some forums, and just when she was about to give up, Talia appeared.
“I wanted to make 100% sure it would work out before I told you. I mean, the first time we clicked pretty good, but today I think—”
“‘First time’?“
“Look, I know.” She peppered my face with apology kisses. “I’ll make it up to you, all right?”
I finished my seltzer water and crinkled the aluminum can between my fingers. “It’s OK,” I said. “It’s perfectly OK.”
And it was, for a time. The following week I finally got a job, at a quaint, photogenic coffeeshop. Not my dream job, but it was within walking distance, and the free coffee helped. I was working on myself, exercising, eating well. Everything I had control over to improve my mood, I was doing. Katie was happy, so I was happy. Most importantly, I was off the sauce.
We continued doing our separate sessions: Katie with Talia, me with J.R. Every time, I saw Katie: answering emails, flossing her teeth, sweating in place on a treadmill, living her life as if vigorously checking items off a list. With poise, self-assurance, and unswervingness. And I would appear, passed out in the backmost booth in the diviest of dives, stained with piss. Or loading coffee mugs into a dishwasher, or crinkling cans of seltzer and watching my comedy program about the President while Katie dozed on the couch.
And after each session, J.R. would say, “I feel we’re making progress here.”
But you know how it is. Sometimes you slide into certain scenarios you never imagined you could ever be comfortable with. For instance, your girlfriend’s experimental self-knowledge therapist or whatever shows up towards the end of your shift, and she’s dyed her hair black and swapped the silver nosering for a tiny black pinprick of a nosestud, a black hole that attracts your eye with irresistible force. And when she says she wants to show you something, like I said, sometimes you just slide right in.
I knew nothing good could come of me making out with Talia in the backseat of that Uber, of me lapping up her patchouli aroma like some thirsty animal. Of going upstairs into her musty, unlived-in-looking apartment and flopping onto her futon to undress and stick our fingers into each other’s holes.
There were boundaries, J.R. had warned. Limits. But the addict brain…the addict brain will always find a way to play out its own shit. And doesn’t it feel good when that raw need that you’ve been trying so hard to ignore, that constant low-level burning sensation gets cooled to nothingness? Doesn’t it feel good to cede control, to let the black fingernails ease their way up your neck and down your holes, too far down, till it doesn’t feel good at all anymore, all the way down to the bottom? And what’s at the bottom?
No idea—bone, maybe, or nerves. Whatever it was, those fingernails touched it. Scraped it.
A sound like steel wool grated on my eardrums from the inside. Electric sparks zapped through my teeth and light erupted from my eyesockets, my ears, every cranial orifice.
On the ceiling above us, the scene unspooled: Katie and myself standing on a doorstep. Someone answered the door who might or might not have been a friend from grade school I haven’t seen in literal decades. My own voice came up my throat and out of my mouth, but high-pitched and ridiculous like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
I hear you’ve become a father.
This old friend—if indeed he was my friend—led us to the room where his baby was lying on a blanket, only instead of a baby it’s a monstrosity no bigger than the palm of one’s hand. A body as cylindrical as a hotdog, two stubby vienna-sausage arms, legs two halves of a broken toothpick. No head or neck, only the faintest implication of what might one day grow to be facial features imprinted at one end of the body-cylinder. Its skin was reddish and wrinkled like a baby marsupial gestating in the pouch.
This friend of mine karate-chopped his baby marsupial in half.
My entire body recoiled at the wrongness of it all.
I orgasmed.
I pissed myself.
Talia handed me a glass jar.
“Here,” she said. “Scream into this.”
She ripped her fingers out of my skullholes and I screamed, I gibbered and whimpered into the jar, things I’d never heard myself say. Sounds I’d never heard myself make. I emptied myself and slumped onto the futon like a deflated balloon. Talia stood over me, clutching a bedsheet across her chest as though I hadn’t had her tits in my mouth minutes earlier.
“You need to go,” she said.
But why, I kept asking as Talia ushered me half-naked down the hall. Why? I demanded, as she threw my trousers at me and slammed the door. Why, I moaned at passersby, some walking their dogs, others jogging sleek and lycra-bound, others in dark suits and sweaters marching forward as if with great purpose, laughing or frowning at luminous phonescreens. Why? They looked like they had all the answers, and no one would tell me.
And there’s only so many times you can ask Why before the question becomes, Why not?
I didn’t bother going to my favorite spot in the backmost booth. I posted up at the bar and flagged down the barman, some new guy I’d never seen. I don’t know what I ordered, I only know that I drank. Drank and drank till I could drink no more. At some point, a taxi must have been called, as I remember tossing the driver some tip-jar money from my last shift and falling on my ass as I slammed the rear passenger-side door shut.
I got up, staggered inside, and the apartment swirled around me, a hurricane of flowered wallpaper. I situated Katie at the eye of the hurricane and focused. She was on the couch staring blackly at the muted TV. An empty glass and a half-empty bottle of wine stood on the coffee table.
“Somebody’s home late,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, holding back a toxic belch. “Something the matter?”
“That I want to talk about? No.”
With that, I cupped my hand over my mouth, ran to the bathroom, and puked. Ropy, bile-thick vomit that still stank of liquor. Puked and puked till I could puke no more, puked myself to sleep. When I opened my eyes, it was the next morning and there was J.R. standing in the bathroom doorway. Black polar fleece, arms akimbo, beard in need of a trim. I could see the disappointment spawn in real time across his tired face.
“Katie told me about last night. I think I know what happened here.” He offered a hand encased in a black glove. “Let’s go.”
•••
Stomach acid churned and bubbled within me as we climbed into J.R.’s car, an old copper-colored sedan.
“Do you remember where she lives?” he asked.
“Who, Talia?”
He gave me a blank look as if to say, Of course Talia, you idiot.
“No, but my phone does.”
I opened the rideshare app, pulled up the trip details and handed the phone to J.R. He nodded half a dozen times and gravely started the engine.
My temples throbbed from the full-fledged hangover now creeping over me as we drove up NE 15th Avenue. J.R. glowered at the asphalt, muttering more to himself than to me. Something about shrines, and seminars, and NDAs.
“How fucking naïve,” he said more than once, pounding a fist on the steering wheel each time. “How naïve could we be, our little gang, to think we’d discovered a way to help people, to create a more decent world. And the McGillerson girl of all people comes along to make a quick buck off it?”
“Talia?” I asked, pressing my face against the cold glass window for relief.
J.R. did a violent double-take at the sound of my voice, as if he’d forgotten I was sitting next to him. His hands kneaded the vinyl steering wheel as he continued.
“She, or whoever she works for, discovered the pathway from the skullholes through the eustachian tubes. And that storage system which, correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve experienced firsthand. Just imagine, Daniel: all your guilt trips and hang-ups, your suppressed yearnings and hurtful memories. Imagine all the heinous shit a con man, or an extortionist, or an oppressive regime might do with them.”
When we reached our destination, J.R. went to the trunk and pulled out an aluminum baseball bat. It swung in his hand and glinted in the stairwell lights as I followed him, still half-cocked and nauseated. Another tenant, a bony grey-haired lady in a tracksuit stood on the first-floor landing, staring and clutching her pet Pomeranian who yapped and hyperventilated as I shambled upward.
Halfway up the stairs, I heard the first smash. When I got to the second floor, the doorknob to Natalia McGillerson’s apartment lay amid splinters across the threshold.
“J.R.?”
I was answered by the breaking of glass and a distant-sounding whoosh.
I rushed into the apartment, pure grain alcohol sweating out my pores. First, the room with the futon. The second, an unfurnished expanse of beige carpeting and a pair of closet doors flung wide open. J.R. stood gripping his baseball bat with both black-gloved hands, shards of glass strewn about his feet.
Inside the closet were shelves and shelves of glass jars. His first blow had taken out the left-hand side of the middle shelves. The surviving jars were identical in size and shape to the one Talia had used on me. Each was labeled with a white sticker, hand-lettered with a surname followed by a comma, and a first name. And somewhere among them, I knew, was my name.
“Wait,” I said. “My jar.”
“What about it?”
I forced myself into the closet and began searching frenetically, adrenaline washing the hangover right out of my blood.
“I want it,” I said. “It’s mine.”
As J.R. prepared for another swing, I lunged and grabbed the thick end of the bat. Even as we strained and struggled, his voice was calm, professional.
“Daniel,” he said, “I want to you think about what you’re doing.”
I gritted my teeth and pulled with all my might. We tumbled backwards out of the closet. The bat fell away and J.R. scrambled after it, cursing. As luck would have it, my jar was near the front with the more recent ones. No sooner had I laid a hand on it than I heard J.R.’s demented scream.
I lurched clear, and down the bat came with an overhead sledgehammer swing.
Amid the cacophony of shattered glass came another whoosh. I heard a thousand ghostly exhalations. The moaning voices of trauma and melancholy. Tawdry fantasies. A chorus of winds howling hatred. Then, the ceiling started thumping overhead, pounding fists or stomping feet, a neighbor’s muffled protestations, barely audible above the din of bad vibes. J.R. pivoted to face me, cool and serene, bat resting on his shoulder.
“It’s best you leave now,” he said.
I took this final piece of J.R’s advice and booked it out of there. A frantic glance over my shoulder was the last I ever saw of him: grimacing madly with the aluminum bat over his head, poised to smash.
•••
I got home around noon. Katie was on the couch, her wine bottle empty this time. We locked eyes in silence. Beams of light did not stream back and forth between our skulls. She rose from the couch woozily and came close enough I could smell the Shiraz on her breath.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.”
“So, it’s been a while.”
She reached around my neck, near where my skullholes would be.
But they weren’t there.
Ever since that moment, I’ve investigated like crazy trying to find an explanation, to no avail. The Skullhole Panic, as it’s come to be known in certain obscure online corners, was a short-lived phenomenon. Within a week, most folks who’d heard of it had either written the whole business off as a hoax or else barely gave a damn to begin with, leaving it in the exclusive domain of the no-planer, Q-is-alien-Jesus types. Among these lunatics, two basic schools of thought have arisen: one claims humanity had collectively drained itself of whatever fuel was feeding those glowing eyesockets, while the other says the holes simply shriveled up, as all things must with time. What’s clear is that at some point, for whatever reason, on the backs of skulls all around the world, holes had closed, never to open again.
I winced and shrunk from Katie’s hand.
“Is it ’cause I’m drunk? It’s because I’m drunk, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on, is it?”
It wasn’t.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on.” She was pleading now, with tears in her eyes.
Seeing her this way was like a spike poking a new hole in me, and like some volatile pressurized liquid it all came spraying out—the anguish, the guilt, the indignity, trying to explain to Katie how I’d failed her, failing to explain my own failure, to explain me and Talia, the bar, J.R., the jars, all of it.
“And how could you not know?” I demanded. “About her?”
“Easy, that’s how!” She had listened, crying in silence, and now paused with a faint, rueful smile as she wiped her nose with the inside of her wrist. “What was I supposed to do, ask? ‘Oh, by the way, Talia, you wouldn’t happen to be violating my most intimate thoughts and packaging them for sale to the highest bidder? Huh, Natalia? Would ya?'”
“There was no jar?”
“Never.”
“And you had no idea? Nary an inkling? Nothing?”
“Believe it or not, it’s easy to not know things about people. Some people are really good at other people not knowing things about them. At some point, Daniel, you just have to trust people.”
We broke up shortly thereafter.
Katie’s doing much better now. We keep a polite but amicable distance on social media. She’s seeing someone else, who I trust is giving her what she needs instead of taking what she needs to give, which is all I ever bothered to do.
As for me, I got help. The old-fashioned way, this time: going to meetings, collecting chips, and so on. I never went in for the whole “higher power” angle, but you know what they say: it works if you work it.
Years later, I’m still single, playing the field, still swiping left and right. Every so often I’ll bring a young woman home and she’ll ask about the empty jar I keep on my nightstand, with my name on the label and the lid screwed on tight.
“Funny story,” I say. “Maybe I’ll show you one day.”
But then we look into each other’s eyes, and we both know that’s never going to happen.
