"I wonder if it's time to reconsider--" Dr. Jane starts.
I feel the back of my neck tighten. I know what she's going to say and she's raised it before and I'm not going to have it. "No."
She gives me a puzzled look. "What's wrong with using the Super Goblin Moving Company?"
I glance down at the small vase of yellow daffodils placed on the coffee table. "Nothing. It just isn’t for me."
"And why is that?"
Maybe it's time for another therapist. After so many sessions, they say the same things over and over and over. The person who said "you can't step into the same river twice" never went to therapy.
"It's not a shortcut I want to take."
"It's not a shortcut. I've had dozens of patients use their services, all of them successfully. Listen, Angel, you've tried. You've worked hard. I've seen you struggle. But you just can't break this impass."
She was right; I was stuck. But that boulder blocked my cave well before I walked through her door.
On the drive home, all the signs are there. A truck emblazoned with "SGMC" blows past me, the driver's huge green arm hanging out the side window. A billboard, bigger than Jesus, advertising: "Super Goblin Moving Company: We Lift the Impossible", pictures of a happy family as if they were an actual moving company. Then, with traffic blocked, I reroute and I'll be damned if I'm not forced to pass their strip mall store front.
How long had I been angry at Alejandro? At my parents? At my fucking life? Nothing was good, and the meds didn't work, and the therapy was bogus, and at the end of my third cocktail, I had to admit that my stupid therapist was right.
#
I sit alone in the waiting room. It's for no more than a minute before a perfectly normal looking human opens a door and calls out, "Ms. Sanford?"
I raise my hand.
"I'm Chloe. Come on back."
I follow her to room number 5, which looks like every other office that pretends to be warm and cozy.
"You're expecting to meet with a goblin, aren't you? Most people do. They're busy, so they hire people like me for the front-end work. Need a few more people, if you ask me. I've been running around crazy."
It doesn’t seem crazy, what without anybody else in the waiting room, though behind the door's smoked glass window, shadows pass.
"Now, what do you want us to lift?"
I take a deep breath. "What do most people come here for?"
She taps her stylus against her pad. "You name it, we take it. There's nothing too small for us, nothing too big. Failed dreams. Unwanted memories. Impulses so disturbing, you wouldn't believe me if I told you, and you wouldn't sleep well at night. But most stuff, truthfully...it's better that the goblins take it than to have it fester in us."
"What do you do with it, once you take it?"
"We carefully place them in barrels and transfer them to Texas, rules and regulations there being what they are, for storage and processing. What the goblins do with them, they don't tell me." She looked at me in confidence. "And I don't want to know."
"What about the price?"
"I’m glad you asked. Most people wait for me to raise that issue. You got to offer something you want, just as much as what you want gone, gone. 'Psychic equilibrium,' they call it. If what you're offering isn't the same weight, well, they'll take something else. It happens occasionally. Those people, they leave with a hole somewhere, only they don't know any more what it is." She laughs. "Once, they took a guy's memory of his wife. Oh, was she pissed."
"That must have been big, what he wanted taken."
"It was monstrous."
Her tone makes it sound like she's not using a metaphor.
"Can't I just pay cash?"
"Goblins got no use for money, aside from what they need to operate the business. They mainly trade in people's memories and emotions."
I see a notification of a file from her on my phone.
"Just sent the standard contract. We do nothing same day. The goblins are insistent on that. And the regulators, of course. Figure out what you want them to take. Write it down on page 7. Then describe on page 17 what you want to give in return. Be specific. Keep it to a page, no more, no less. You’ll come in and out with exactly what you describe on those pages.”
“That doesn’t sound easy.”
“We've served thousands of happy customers in this very office. But the outcome depends on you. We'll help you along the way."
I don't trust myself not to chicken out. I make a follow-up appointment in a week.
"You won't regret it," she says.
#
"How am I supposed to fill it out?" I ask Dr. Jane.
"How do you want to fill it out?"
Seriously, I don't know why I even bother to ask her. I knew I'd get a less than helpful response.
"I mean, what should I put down, in terms of the specific something they take out?"
Dr. Jane taps her fingers on the edge of her chair. I wonder if she's conscious that she does that when she doesn't know the right answer.
"You want to know what to write down."
Seriously serious, I don't know why I bother to come in.
"Listen, they were very firm about this legal form, and I need to get it right. And as far what to give up, that's more unsettling. And it was your idea to begin with, so I don't know why you can't even help me. It's what I pay you for."
"You're frustrated because you feel like you're not getting any help from me."
I don't know how to respond. So I don't.
She waits for me to answer.
I can wait just as long as she can.
Until I can't.
"I should just ask them to take out all of my therapy experiences, since they've been so unhelpful."
"That would be one approach," Dr. Jane says, "if you think that's the core of what bothers you."
"Everything bothers me. And I can't ask them to take everything away."
"What would be bad about them taking everything?"
Her questions, sometimes, make no sense whatsoever. I let out a long breath before I answer. "They'd end up taking all of my positive experiences."
"Have you made a list of your options?"
"I've thought about them."
"What about writing them down? Items for both page 7 and page 17. That might help you narrow on what to pick."
Of course she'd tell me to make a freaking list.
"Don't you already know what you'd tell the goblins to take if you were me?"
"No," she said. She didn't tap her fingers.
#
I pore over the form. Lots of legalese, most of which I skip over. If you're willing to have the goblins lift shit out of your brain, there's potentials and risks, and they've lawyered up to protect themselves from anything I could throw at them. So those twelve sets of initials and signatures of acknowledgement are easy.
But what should I ask them to remove?
As much as I hate to admit, Dr. Jane was right. I make a list. The fight that was the final straw with my ex-husband, when I left him stranded in Nashville. A handful of ex-boyfriends, though I end up taking Theo off. My job, unsurprisingly, makes six different appearances. all superficial. I get deeper. My sister's third grade piano recital, when my parents doted on how wonderful she was, and I threw up, and my parents were so angry, thinking that I did it on purpose, as if that were possible, to take attention away from Ginger, when it turned out I had the flu and ended up with a fever and bedridden for two days.
That was the first of a laundry list of situations with my mother and father and my all-too-perfect sister. Those frustrations and disappointments just go on and on. Was there any one event?
Takes me three days, on and off. Three days closer to my appointment.
Then I turn to page 17 of the legal agreement.
If I stumbled through page 7, page 17 absolutely paralyzes me. What do I possibly have that carries the same weight as what I had written, knowing that I have to put down just one for the single page of blank space they allow?
My wedding day? It was nice, but the divorce ruined those memories, didn't they?
My mother's death? Not that I wanted her dead, but I genuinely cherish those last moments with her, the confessions of love and regret from both of us, holding her hand until the end. Ginger too busy, of course, to come.
No, I won't let that go. But what if they take these memories by mistake?
So I do for page 17 what I had done for page 7 and write down all the positives to decide what might fit and, just in case, what I can read later if they take the wrong thing.
I write about the family vacation in the Adirondacks when I was 17 and backpacking in Europe after college graduation, the excitement of my first real job at an advertising firm, the time the neighborhood took up a collection when my car broke down and I couldn't afford repairs. Even wrote about my honeymoon, which made me smile, thinking of Alejandro scrambling after losing the train tickets, and how he hustled to get us to Nice.
Do I want to give away any of them?
Five days of writing and processing my shit, and I'm still undecided on what to remove and what to give up.
#
I enter the clinic, on time, my palms sweaty. Chloe calls me up, and she greets me like we're old friends.
"You have the forms?" she asks after escorting me to the same room as last time.
"I want to speak to a goblin about my request."
"Are you sure that I can't take care of--"
"Yes, I'm sure."
"One of those," she tsked. "Should have known. I'll see who's available. Could be a little while."
"Of course." I don’t expect it to be quick.
Chloe returns after a long while, and with her is a goblin. He fills the small room, just a bit taller and a tad wider than we humans. He wears a blue jumpsuit, strikingly clean, with the letters "SGMC" embroidered in flowery script on the upper left side.
"Ms. Sanford," he says as he walks in.
"You the head goblin?"
"We don't really have what you call a 'head,' as you humans do." His English was perfect, if guttural. "Some of us even conjecture about that being the core of human fallacy, but," he shakes its head, "I've reserved my judgement. What questions of yours might I answer?"
He's a rambler.
"What if I don't want something taken from me? What if I want something added?"
He nods and furrows his brows and looks me over with black eyes that carry a trace of gold. We two species aren't all that different. "That's a special kind of contract."
#
Super Goblin Moving Company might not deal in human currency, but they do need human labor. I take weekend shifts, when it's busier, to pay off my debt. I insisted on a blue jumpsuit for myself. If I’m going to help customers, I want to look the part.
And what did I get in return? Instead of taking something out, I had them put in others' memories, what others wanted to jettison. Not wholesale, but a little bit of a lot of them. My anger's still there, but there's so much more to me than there was. Fragments and tidbits, hints of sadness and disgust and heartache. Some, like Chloe promised, give me shivers or make me want to vomit when they surface. But I'm larger because of them. More understanding of people.
All those positives listed in that journal are still with me. And I'm making more.
I adjust the consulting rooms, adding to each a box of tissues and a vase with a single flower. I realize that it's just like Dr. Jane's office. But that's fine. She did me a lot of good.
I hear the first customer come in. I'm ready to listen with a soft heart. And to share.
I'm going to like working here just fine.