Face To Face With The Doctor

Jared: part 1

I met a boy. I knew him for a while actually, but we didn’t know each other at all.

We were in a professional organization. He was there and I was there but his name had too many vowels and I never learned it. 

He is a military combat veteran turned doctor of mind fuckery and headmaster of a rehab school for young wizards. Injured in the call of duty and recipient of a purple heart, he runs his business like if a swarm of army ants were an entrepreneur. Handsome and fit, he looks fine on the outside but looks can be deceiving.

Every ex-military man I know is a fucked up, shit-talking psychopath. The verdict is still out on the impending truth of that statement. 

To the casual observer he is supremely confident, perceived by most to be arrogant. It’s all an act but I thought it was real.

He’s an Aries Rooster and nothing about that is surprising.

Ten months passed and then one day I went to his office for coffee. After getting lost twice I arrived late but not as late as him. 

I was walking through the front door before realizing that his first name was probably not Doctor. Lucky for me, Jared has every award, certificate and diploma he’s ever won framed and hung on the wall of his reception room. 

Sometimes in life, shit gets different in a hurry.

Jared is impeccably polite with the language and mannerisms of a highly sophisticated mind. Everything about him is setting off my spider sense but I don’t know why. He makes me a cup of coffee with powdered Coconut creamer from Costco, and then we begin the tour. I still think this is a normal day.

In the main treatment room, he is explaining the history of a wooden desk that was gifted to him by someone important and for a prestigious reason. I missed some of the finer points because while he was talking, a slip in the time line occurred, and clear as day I saw us fucking on that desk. Intense, passionate, familiar. Not like something I dreamt up in the moment but a premonition of absolute certainty. He turned around to see if I was listening and I reassured him that whatever he just said was indeed riveting while thinking to myself “whoa..”. 

Jared never said or did anything even remotely inappropriate. I drank my coffee and tried not to spill crazy on him.

Eventually the tour comes to an end and we sit across from each other at a table where the sun also rises. Neither of us can look away.

I’m keeping my visions to myself but he opens with “I killed a guy on a sand dune in 2010”. Under the ruse of a wartime killing it was, by his own admission, a murder. Not undeserved but a murder nonetheless. He just sat across the table and told me that with a straight face.

Well ok then, game on.

With unblinking eye contact we spend the next three hours definitely not talking about business. 

I say that, in my experience, the military seems to attract the wrong personality type. He says, “it does attract a lot of sociopaths”. Apparently I did something subtle and he said, “I saw your reaction when I said ‘sociopath’. Someone has tried to hurt you.” I get control of my face and ask, “would you like the list in alphabetical or chronological order?” He says, “Sometimes we have personality traits that make us vulnerable.” I say, “Yeah, I guess we do… until we don’t.”

The conversation goes on like this. Profiling personality types, discerning motives based on subtle changes in posture and language. Nothing about this is a professional conversation. Or rather, everything about it is a professional conversation.

We’re trading personal stories, deeply personal stories, but there is no flirting and he is strictly a perfect gentleman. Like I said, impeccable manners but something… something else is happening. A harmonic resonance. When we look at each other, the energy flows intensely and time stops. More than that, he speaks in my vernacular, using several of my unique words and phrases. Things like “Good ole boys”, “charlatan” and “the devil is in the details”. 

In one snippet of conversation he says, “I knew he was an entitled piece of shit when he asked for his treat.” Me: “To use the word ‘treat’ in that context is very telling”. Him: “Exactly. I never say that word because it’s disgusting”.

Our “coffee talk” started at 10:30 but at 11:45 there was another meeting we were both supposed to attend. He asked if I wanted to go. I can’t explain it but the thought of disrupting the moment seemed totally unacceptable. I felt like it would cause physical pain to break our connection right then. Dr. of Mind Fuckery indeed. Why can’t I get up from this table? That’s not exactly what I said but we didn’t go to the other meeting and he seemed pleased.

We were talking about my first marriage and for some reason I felt it appropriate to say, “I react poorly to feeling trapped”, followed by, “I’m really good at flying under the radar”.

Jared asked me what brought it to a head, what was the final blow. Before I can explain, he interrupts and says, “Just so you know, I would never share any of this with anyone”. I’m caught off guard by the fact I never even considered that I shouldn’t be telling him these things.

I said, “I don’t tell this story but.. lucky you I guess.” 

I look up and he has both forearms on the table, fingers extended, leaning forward, eyes wide with rapt attention and says, “I’m fascinated”. And he really is. 

On a Tuesday in 2014, I hurt my back at the gym and was home for the day. Sitting at my computer reading an email from Ira when my step dad calls to say that my grandma is dying and won’t probably won’t survive another 24 hours. I never heard him sound so upset and it rattled me. While we were talking, my computer went to sleep but my email was still open. I got off the phone in an altered state of mind and knew I had to get to his house right away. The computer screen was black and I just picked my stuff and left. It was a pivotal mistake.

When I returned home later that night, Carl was sitting at my computer and the screen was on. Back in the day, I didn’t have a lock screen so the computer woke up and went right back to whatever it was doing when it dozed off. He’s in front of my open email. I have no idea how long he’s been there or what he has or hasn’t seen. He doesn’t say anything about it and neither do I. There’s nothing I can say that isn’t incriminating so I cook myself some pasta and then ask him to move so I can sit in my chair.

Later that evening, Carl says “We need to talk this weekend, because there are many things to talk about.”  

I still don’t know for sure what he did or didn’t see but that was, in fact, the last nail in the coffin.

For the past hour, Jared has been ignoring notifications on his phone but now it starts to ring. He looks irritated and holds up one finger to indicate “shhh”.  He lies to his wife so we can continue talking and I would be dumbfounded except I’m not even surprised. I am sitting across the table from someone who is almost exactly like myself, like looking in a mirror. He hangs up the phone and says, “I’m so sorry for the interruption. You were saying?”

It’s unsettling to see the wheel in the sky turn like that.

We continued talking for another half hour or so and, in case I hadn’t already pointed out, the sexual tension is becoming unbearable. And yet, there is no flirting, nothing at all inappropriate is said or done. He never makes a move or gets up from the table and all I can think is “who are you??”

It is 2:00 and we are out of time. He has to teach a class and I have to go. We hug and promise to schedule a follow up coffee talk. We both know what is meant by “follow up coffee talk”.

I leave his office feeling rattled by this unexpectedly intimate experience and, over the next few days, convince myself that I must’ve made the whole thing up. That delusion could not have been real. I mean, nothing actually happened, right? Right?