I asked Marlene to picture the day her ex broke her nose and waved the wash out wand across the base of her skull. Her light hair fanned out around her head on the pillow as the ultraviolet waves penetrated her Hippocampus, where external event memories were thought to be stored. Prone, she recalled images of Freud and his ladies from early psych textbooks. Or, perhaps darker, if she slipped from the pillow to hang off the edge, someone would have mistaken her for a modern day pictorial of Fuseli’s Nightmare.
I sat close enough to her that I smelled her lilac perfume. Noticed an undercurrent of sweat, like onions.
Some consultant–likely worth a cool million–had advised the Bureau for Tragedy Exchange to structure their offices like therapists’ rooms rather than a doctor’s office. But they hadn’t sprung for leather couches and personal library collections, so we were stuck with teal IKEA couches and shelves with cardboard backing that held empty books, the spindled feet set on synthetic hardwood. Every time Marlene shifted on the couch, it crinkled loudly. At least the walls were a gentle taupe instead of hospital white.
The look and feel supposedly made getting rid of trauma easier, but I wasn’t so sure. Especially not ones with physical associations like Marlene’s. She had to see her nose every day, how it healed around the break, and pulling out all tendrils of this particular incident was tough work. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure the Exchange was up for it, but she was in too deep now. Once the treatment began, she couldn’t receive cash compensation, so she was motivated to see it through to the end. Mostly so, maybe, one day she could sleep again.
Her eyelids twitched as I brought the bleach light over the right-hand side by her temple. Blue veins mapped an interstate across her thin skin. The wand gave off a faint buzz. I hummed along.
The monitor at my desk blinked with the image of Marlene’s cortex, zooming in as the wand did its work. I watched the memory particles, small floating amoebas, pop and burst like enemy ships on a video game. I hoped, as I did with all my patients, that she wasn’t letting her mind drift.
We’d destroyed precious things by accident before.
When we were done, she rested in corpse pose on the couch so she didn’t fall over as she rose. I booked her weekly appointment. Always Thursdays.
“You good?” I asked.
“Yup,” her voice was weak and small. Gently, I helped her up to stand and led her to the door before motioning to the exit. Cassandra leaned casually–too casually–against the wall across from my office, but I ignored her. Cassandra waiting outside for you when an appointment wasn’t fully closed was normally a problem.
I focused on Marlene instead. The muscles in her face had relaxed, showing the divots of her laugh lines and the crackle of wrinkles across her forehead. The bump at the bridge of her nose. Her pupils, the ones previously hidden by her pale lids, had an unfocused quality.
“Have you tried covering up the mirrors? At least until we get somewhere?” I said.
“Not a bad idea,” she said. Which meant she hadn’t listened to me last time.
“Remember, don’t drive for the next hour and I’ll see you next Thursday,” I said.
“Thanks, Yvonne,” she said and headed toward the exit.
Patients never left the way they came in and often, unless you searched it out, you wouldn’t know a building was a Bureau for Trauma Exchange unless you requested an appointment. Of the two, I loved the disguised exit far more. It took folks through the back of the building and into a closed flower shop. As much as we liked to pretend it wasn’t the case, there was still stigma for seeking out the Bureau. It marked a person. The worst were people who sniffed at the work we did and called it ‘a hand out’ or worse, ‘woke welfare’. Not something the traumatized deserved for the horrors they’d endured.
“New intake for you,” Cassandra said. She had crossed the floor between us and leaned over my door jam, a brown file in hand
“Why can’t Becky take her?” I asked. “This is my only break today.”
“Not her specialty,” Cassandra said.
I rolled my eyes. “We both know that’s bullshit.” It wasn’t like we were the ear, nose, and throat guys.
“I think you’d find this one interesting. It’s a bit of a sensitive case,” she said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Sensitive was in our contract. Sensitive was what we dealt in every day.
“They’re from Lockland Correctional.”
My jaw dropped. Cassandra smirked. I’d vaguely followed the bill on my morning political podcast that had recently classified intake and exchange as a necessary medical procedure and, with prisoners, you weren’t supposed to withhold needed healthcare. They were people, though I’d noticed society did everything they could to tell us otherwise.
“What they in for?” I asked.
Maybe Cassandra was right. This was interesting. Maybe too interesting. Especially to someone whose life was all picture books about talking rabbits for my daughter, Tallulah, and large iced coffee with almond milk, please to the same cute barista at Blue Bottle who never remembered my name. And true crime documentaries, so many true crime documentaries, especially the ones about Mormons, that kept me up at night.
“Just treatment. No talk therapy,” Cassandra said.
Always push treatment first before compensation, they’d told us. If someone hadn’t been around when the Bureaus were first established, they might have mistaken the thirty-second ads of readjusted people playing on water-sucking lawns for government propaganda about antidepressants.
You’re entitled to another shot at life after trauma. You deserve a life free of the memories holding you back, the very white people in the very white commercials said, even though, statistically, trauma disproportionately impacted minorities and those in lower socio-economic groups.
But clearly, that wasn’t an option.
“Are they in Lockland because they–” I let the end of the sentence trail off. Cassandra rubbed her forehead.
“You’ll be able to see the prisoner without an armed escort in the room, if that answers your question,” Cassandra said. “We need to treat them like we would everyone else.”
Though that wasn’t necessarily true if they didn’t have a choice of cash versus treatment. I also didn’t like the we Cassandra used because with Cassandra, there was no we, only you. She’d been an Exchange Bureau manager for so long I doubted that she remembered what it was like doing an intake or treatment herself. More likely than not, she’d probably blind herself with the wand.
“Anyway, go grab some water, bathroom, whatever. We’ll bring her in in five,” Cassandra said. With that, she unstuck herself from the doorframe and turned back down the hall to reception.
I went for a smoke instead by the flower shop exit. The windows were painted in a grimy gray, single coat, so it just looked irreparably dirty for any passersby in the alley. Like how, if you did only one coat of polish, you could still see the fingernail skin beneath. The Bureau had even scattered bits of compost and dirt around the floor as well as some shattered flower pots for good measure. Convincing.
As I propped the door open, the brick grated against metal. I pulled out my weed pen. Technically, it was frowned upon to be high at work, perhaps even illegal, but this was a microdose and utterly odorless. Technological advances doing what they did best. Everyone said a single mom’s life was so hard, but they never gave anything for you to cope and then, when you did, they feigned disgust.
The exhale blasted from my nostrils in twin streams of white, the high hitting the front of my head like an inhale from a helium balloon. This was what the government should have been subsidizing, I thought. Not wash outs, but weed. We’d all be fine if we just had weed. And free childcare.
The sun was high in its color above the sliver of shadow and cement dust I stood in between buildings. It was a platinum burst bordered with hints of ice and rhubarb stem and nursery room. It glanced off the glass facades of urban camouflage. Overwhelming contrast. For a moment, I felt the searing need to crouch and curl and cry. But the dryness from the high had already invaded my eyeballs.
Pull yourself together, Yvonne. You will get through today and pick Tallulah up and start again like you did yesterday and the day before that and five years since you thought you would never see her again.
Some days, it required reminding.
I took one last hit from the pen and tucked it back into my belted work pants. With one hand, I popped a few drops in both eyes, wiped my face, and headed back into the Bureau.
My office door was open and a woman in a black SWAT uniform stood outside. She was a good three inches shorter than me, but her bulletproof vest made her look taller. A filing cabinet with a gun. A small buzz of panic blurred behind my eyes.
“She’s in there,” the woman said, nodding at where the carpet from my room met the hallway’s hardwood. There was a textured purple scar running down the side of her right hand.
“Keep the timing tight,” the guard said. Her icy eyes watched me, unmoving. “Otherwise, I’ll be in there right when the half hour is up. We don’t want to keep other people who need you more waiting.”
There was something in those last words I found myself both agreeing with and hating at the same time. I never much felt that people at the Exchange needed me. They needed money or someone to talk to. I was just the vehicle and, sometimes, the immovable object between them and relief. I thought about Marlene’s skittish hands. The way she asked me to close the window blinds so she didn’t accidentally catch out her reflection.
I wasn’t what they needed.
People transformed my office when they walked into it which was why I liked being in there before they took a seat. I stepped over the threshold and closed the office door behind me. There was a gentle rustle of the couch cushion.
Steady, I said to myself. And then, I turned.
Instead of settling in the couch center, the prisoner had perched on the armrest. Even sitting down she was tall, bony, all limbs. There was an I’m-about-to-startle-so-be-gentle twitch to her. If she wasn’t from Lockland, I would have wondered if the tick came from too much caffeine, maybe coke. The need to pay off the electric bill.
The walls, normally comforting in their sandy color, darkened the room. We were crossing into the time of day where the sun wasn’t on this side of the building. I flipped the switch for a standing lamp in the corner. It made the shadows worse.
“You can get comfortable,” I said.
She glanced at the couch center.
“I think I’m good here,” she said. “Don’t want to get too used to the plushness, you know? It’ll make me miss it more.”
I balked, but still managed to make my way to my computer and office chair which, luckily, faced the couch. Careful not to put my back to her.
“I’m Yvonne,” I said. “One of the Bureau’s Intake and Exchange administrators.”
“Fancy way of saying you work for the same people who put me inside,” the prisoner said. She wasn’t wrong.
“I’m just going to pull up your file and ask a few questions before we get started,” I said, falling back to my training, to the routine. I logged into my account and then opened my patient queue. Clicked her file.
Carla McGill. Odessa, TX. 25. She/her pronouns. Status: New intake. Reason for visit: close relation death.
No reference to her current prisoner status. The only difference being that the recommended treatment path was already locked to her account: wash out. No cash option.
Normally, I didn’t need the introduction script, but I pulled it up on my monitor anyway, just in case. Between the weed and my nerves, there was a real possibility I’d draw a blank in the middle of a speech I’d given hundreds of times before in the years I’d worked here.
“Before we begin, I’m going to walk you through the basics of how all of this works,” I said.
Carla shifted her hands under her thighs. “You ever have the treatment done?” she asked.
Something cracked in my chest. No one had asked me a genuine question in months. Between Tallulah and work, I didn’t get out much.
“No,” I said.
Eyes rounded, Carla tipped forward, as if by edging closer she’d somehow get absorbed straight into the memory itself.
“You took the money instead, didn’t you?”
Shocked, I swallowed hard and turned back at the screen. It wasn’t fast enough.
Carla smiled. “Wow. What were you in for?”
The way she said it–maybe she’d done it on purpose–made me lean back. I crossed my arms in front of my chest. I’d told a bartender once and he’d stopped serving me, which, fair play to him. After that, I never went back for a drink. Carla leaned further forward still, all nervous jitter gone. A surprise crease appeared where the top of her nose met her forehead.
Stay calm. Cool. Collected.
“We’re here for you, today,” I said.
“Did you kill someone?” she asked.
“I didn’t kill anyone,” I said. It came out sharper than I intended and she settled back into the couch. A smugness turned up her lips.
“Sounds like you’re making an assumption. About me. I knew you judged me the second you walked in after you saw my escort. I saw it on your face. Just like everybody else. Show me that we’re different.”
Carla’s eyes tripped to the bookcase behind me. From where I sat, I could see the side edges were worn. Cracked from turning a screw too far.
I cleared my throat. I needed to get the situation back on the rails. “You’ve been prescribed a wash out for the trauma you’re dealing with,” I said.
“Which one?”
Even though her voice exuded a confidence that put me on my back foot, there was a gritty sadness in the finish. I focused back on my monitor.
“Technically, you get to choose. If you’re not careful, you could lose something important.”
The room fell into silence as Carla picked at the skin around her thumb. From where I sat, the cuticle was already a blistered red. My stomach flipped.
“What do you mean if I’m not careful?” A tremor passed through her bleeding thumb. “Aren’t you the one deep frying my brain?”
“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” I said. It added to the Bureau’s mystique.
“If I get to choose, maybe I can forget the look you gave me instead when I walked in,” she said.
The part of me that wanted people to like me, that always wanted to say something more to the barista, put sorry on the edge of my tongue. I wasn’t a monster, but she definitely knew how to make someone feel like it.
You’re a professional, I told myself
“Let’s finish the walkthrough first. Don’t want to waste any more time.”
“Yes, that precious government time,” she said. Her eyes had the same quality as Talullah’s: the irises and pupils undifferentiable. They sent me straight back to the morning, her whining and tears streaming out of those eyes. The things I do for you, Tallulah, I thought.
“During the session, I need you to focus in vivid detail on the exact memory that is causing you trauma. Try to recall all of it: sounds, the way the surroundings looked. The way the air smelled. The clearer you can get, the easier it will be for our technology to target the areas of concern. And, the faster you’ll be out of here,” I said.
“Do I get to watch the brain cells disappear?” she asked.
I shook my head. “The tech can damage your vision.” She bit her lip. I entered wash out mode on the computer and the wand on its charging post began to hum.
“That looks like a vibrator,” Carla said. I wondered when the last time she’d seen one was. How long she’d been at the correctional for and how long, before that, a vibrator had been a part of her life.
“My daughter thinks it looks like a magic wand,” I said. Tallulah loved telling the other kids in her class about it.
“Same thing, right?” Carla smirked.
A snort bubbled in my chest. Maybe it was the weed. Even though she wasn’t close to me, she felt uncomfortably so. Her lips curled upward, a mirror.
“If you tell me what happened to you, I’ll say the treatment worked faster than normal. I’ll be the number one bureau advocate out there. Reformed prisoner. Whatever you want,” she said.
Outside of the lonely bartender at Shirley’s on fifth, the only other person who knew about what had happened was the San Antonio Exchange officer who’d performed my evaluation all those years ago. I’d traveled to a different city so no one in Austin would find out about it. Since its inception in the late 2030s, the government’s Bureau network and associated technology was at the mercy of state funding. Some regional centers like New England and the Pacific Northwest exchanged data but the infrastructure even in-state for Texas was spotty at best. It had been from the beginning.
If the government really wanted to get its ads right, all it had to do was tell people what the cash didn’t give me. How $1,500 bucks didn’t help me forget barreling towards the barrier, the last licks of Chardonnay souring my breath. Tallulah in her car seat in the back.
Even now, I still had nightmares about waking up in a flipped car. Because of the angle, blood seeped into my socks and filled my shoes. I only found out later we’d hit a deer, that it broke our crash first, but for the space of that minute, I didn’t know who the blood belonged to. The $1,500 cash comp paid for rent that month, but I couldn’t drive anymore and, in Texas, it made living just a bit harder.
“You’ll need to lie down for this,” I said.
“Yes, Ma’am,” she said.
Standing, she was a good foot taller than me, though her shoulders bowed forward like a sulky teenager. Maybe she’d worked in an office before Lockland. One with no standing desks or maybe, she’d had childhood scoliosis. I pulled on my protective goggles as she lay down. My breath fogged the lens.
I readjusted the straps and then crossed the carpet. I hooked my fingers under the rolly chair’s post and pulled it over to her head.
“I need you to close your eyes,” I said. “And focus on the memory.”
Which one, I wasn’t sure. I should have asked. I asked all my other patients, the Marlenes of the world, to prep their brain cells, to start the recall ahead of time so there was something there to get rid of. But I hadn’t with Carla.
For some reason, I couldn’t.
At least, that was what the Bureau’s intention had been when the well-meaning congressman from South Dakota had started it all. A center to provide reparations, mostly for impacted Indigenous and Black Americans which, somewhere in the Senate had been twisted into a more generic Trauma Exchange to get white moderates comfortable with giving out compensation for emotional work. The system was immediately overwhelmed and started cutting corners, creating behind-the-scenes compensation bands or worse, passing things told in confidence to law enforcement to put more people in prison.
“Maybe, I can forget how I got here so we can just be two people talking,” she said. “And one of us is holding a weird vibrator. That’d be a wild thing to wake up to.”
“What put you in Lockland?” I asked. The wand thrummed, but the rest of the room quieted.
She opened one eye, the slit of black staring up at me. “Let’s get this over with.”
The eye closed again. Her hands knitted together across her stomach. She sniffed and then rolled her shoulders back into the teal couch. Her pixie cut didn’t melt into the cushion like Marlene’s hair had. Her sneakers hung off the other armrest. They were pristine. New.
I uncapped the wand and began. The green light flicked above her scalp. Her skin peeped between her follicles; the cropped hairs swayed as the wand passed over them. Back and forth, back and forth. The scrubbing of clothes against the notched wooden plank. A part of life, erased.
When it was over, I had Carla rest on the couch while I scheduled her next visit. She hummed something with a sugary hook, something I’d grown up with. I didn’t join her even though I wanted to.
When her eyes reopened, she shifted to lay sideways. It reminded me of when I was a kid and my neighbor would come over and lay on my bed and we’d gossip about our crushes as our hands moved closer together.
“This has been nice,” Carla said.
A strange sentiment. I checked her face. The muscles around her mouth had relaxed. The divot above her nose uncreased. I couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or not. Either way, I could pretend as well.
“Well,” I said. “It won’t be the last time we see each other. Got a few more marinations before we really get to the bottom of it.”
“It’s like edges have been smudged off,” she said. “Easier to forget the world’s a briar patch surrounded by wolves.”
I offered my hand to help her stand and, she took it. We walked to the door and just before I was about to open it, she pressed her fingers on my arm.
“You know, people drink and drive and don’t kill people all the time,” Carla said. “Especially in Texas.”
I froze, hand a half turn on the doorknob.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone except myself,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
I couldn’t breathe, but also couldn’t move from where we stood, hovering at the entrance. I focused instead on the whorls in the office door’s wood, the large black hole left of center. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. That I was worse and that the world didn’t know order.
She squeezed my arm gently. “Thank you,” she whispered. “No one has treated me like a person in a long time. Let’s hope this isn’t goodbye.”
Something in my chest crackled, bursting into flower. Something like immediate regret. Carla didn’t look back at me when she left, only forward, as she stepped away with the guard back to the exit and then out of sight.
It wasn’t until after she left that I realized what she’d decided to forget. After all, it was exactly what she’d promised.
Salena Casha’s work has appeared in over 100 publications in the last decade. Her most recent work can be found on HAD, Wrong Turn Lit, and Ghost Parachute. She survives New England winters on good beer and black coffee. Subscribe to her substack at salenacasha.substack.com