The Virtual Swallows of Hog Island
Julianna Baggott
Everything had been going along just fine. Helen Viorst was in the game. She was playing well, as she had been for three months of intensive outpatient therapy. The trouble hit when she was sent into her Childhood Kitchen. In this part of the game, I’d coded a close-enough replica. In my career, I’ve recreated hundreds of Childhood Kitchens. The program auto-adjusts for approximations of era and status, and the vast majority of our clients were raised with great wealth. But I’ve found that you’ve got to get the appliances spot-on or everything falls apart. You’d be surprised how much time as a child you spent considering the internal organs of your Childhood Kitchen. But remember the Refrigerator blinked open with holy light and offered Food. The Oven burst wide with Maternal Heat and offered Nourishment. The Washing Machine made things clean and new, Redemption. Of course, as ever, the necessary finishing touches (the ones that spark Deep Trauma) were provided by Helen’s memory, things she spilled in sessions with her therapist, Klaus Han.
(I’ll get to Klaus in due time.)
Helen’s details included a certain kind of cookie called Friar Tuck Melt-Aways, with a chocolate candy inside. I found the brand name and recreated a box of them. She offered both of her parents’ shoes—her father wore fine Italian leather lace-ups that cuffed his ankles and her mother wore open-toed high heels with lots of unnecessary straps that hung limply around the delicate, “almost birdlike” bones of her feet. And, most importantly, Helen whispered to Klaus Han in her session—you can listen for yourself, her voice goes raspy for a moment on the tapes—that she would hide underneath a table (made of Pink Ivory wood imported from Mozambique) built into the corner of the kitchen, and curl up next to her terrier, Duchess.
“There was a heating vent under there,” Helen said. “Duchess and I used to hide next to it while my parents fought. I could see their shoes and, because they didn’t know I was there, they said the cruelest things to each other.”
In this particular nook of her virtual reality, Klaus had said, “Go literal, Archie.” And to get a feel for Klaus, I think it’s important to note that my name isn’t Archie. It’s Archer Frimm. And he told me this in his office while he was using a touch-up kit to dye the white roots of his hair. His bulky hands were fitted into latex gloves so as not to stain his fingernails and he was daubing his temples with a small brush—the size of a doll’s janitorial push broom—while looking at a mirror propped on his desk.
I’m not going to lie. I have issues with Klaus Han. He once took me out for drinks when I was a new hire and he leaned over his plate of puffed-up three-cheese gougeres and duck rillettes while fishing shiny cocktail onions out of his martini and, with overblown exhaustion, he said, “You know what they call me. The Bad-Boy of Virtual Reality Therapy. I’m a renegade.” He waved his fat hand, the kind of bulbous knuckles you’d find on a boxer. “It is what it is.” And then he went on to tell me that he himself had dabbled in coding as a boy but thought it was way too tedious for his expansive imagination. “I do ideas.”
I probably nodded and smiled at all of this. And as I think about it now, I hate my face, sweet and slightly misty with perspiration. My God, I wanted Klaus Han to like me even though I was already sure I despised him.
At the end of the night, he hugged me sloppily—all meaty paws and clapping my back like I was a colicky baby—and while chest-to-chest, he whispered into my ear, “I didn’t expect you to smell like money.” He’d meant it as a compliment, but I left thinking that he was the kind of man who’d let another man know that he was blatantly smelling him. People shouldn’t acknowledge that they’re smelling other people. I know Klaus well enough guess that, if questioned, he’d say it’s primal, something like: “No way around it. When we embrace, we take a whiff. There’s DNA in that scent.”
However, Klaus is brilliant. I’ll give him that. His methods do make him a renegade. And this was what he was famous for—knowing the precise moment in a patient’s therapy to pivot away from the big World-Building phase of the Archetypal Abstractions of trauma, grief, and despair, and go for something simple and profound. The root of the cause.
Look, I’d built an incredible Jungian, Freudian virtual reality for Helen. Sure, I relied on worlds I’d built before. She began as only a Shadow of herself, navigating all the basics: a deluge, an apocalypse. Klaus said, “I’d go with nuclear war for this one. Okay? Can you manage?”
Helen had battled an angry giant—Daddy, of course. We even made the giant a little jittery sometimes, like her own father, who was known to do a few lines of coke at the office holiday party or after a big merger or with his mistress at the Grand Hotel Vigdof in Chelyabinsk—Russia, that is, where the old man had a lot of shady pharmaceutical ties.
As a Shadow, Helen was hounded by a wolf who nipped at her constantly but never devoured her whole, aka Mommy. And Mommy also became the threatening Maiden; I stuck that bit in when Helen was trying to survive the Deluge.
Helen, who’d had no children of her own, had also been through Creation. “Really turn up the green. Make this a beauty, okay?” Klaus told me. “Don’t hold back on Eden.”
Eventually, during all of this, Helen went from Shadow to Animal—she chose to be a bear, which Klaus thought was “very interesting” and “a good sign”—to Child—she’d been big-eyed and unusually small in her youth and unable to swim. She would enter her Childhood Kitchen as a Child. It was the last level she had to pass before becoming Self.