They call me Elliot at the office, but my psychiatrist calls me Osiris. I have asked him to tell me my real name. But my real name, he says, does not fit on our human tongues. It cannot be given human shape, pressed and molded and beaten into the flat of our mouths. My psychiatrist tells me Osiris fits me, because he's having to pick up all my pieces, just like Isis did for Osiris after Set tore him to pieces. Put me back together again. I'd like to think I can believe him.
The first time I met my psychiatrist I found him sitting at my kitchen table in the middle of the night, wearing an off-white suit, an off-white smile, with his briefcase on the table in front of him, his fingers snapping on and snapping off its latches.
"Elliot, as you're called," he said, "It's been years since I've heard from you. Tell me. What's happened?"
I set my glass of water down on the counter. He tilted his head to regard me when I didn't speak.
"You don't recognize me, then?"
"No," I said, "Is this a dream?"
"Oh, dear, I don't have time for a philosophical debate. I'm simply here to report for the council."
"Council?" I asked. I reached for the phone.
"Are you calling the police?" he asked.
"Yes."
"That's not necessary," he said, "And futile. I've disabled your phone."
I put the phone to my ear. Dead. "You cut the wire?"
"No, I said I disabled the phone. Once I leave it will be in working order shortly. You must learn to pay attention."
I set the phone down. "What do you want?"
"Would you like a cigarette?"
"I don't smoke."
"Of course. Of course. Would cause undue harm to this body you're carrying. Come sit down."
I sat. He pulled a carton of cigarettes from his jacket's inside pocket, tapped out a cigarette. Lit. Breathed. His teeth were to me like optic lights, the ends of nerve-wire.
"You got any alcohol?" he asked, "Some corona, perhaps?"
"Why are you here?"
"No? Pity. That's I suppose what you would call, hmm, good shit."
"Who are you?"
"I'm your psychiatrist. And you've forgotten why we've sent you here. It happens sometimes, we forget we're more than the body. The body makes our thoughts slow, turns our heads sluggish. We have to eat. Get sick. Throw up what we eat. A terrible affair."
"I don't understand," I said.
"Of course you don't. Who's the lovely blonde vixen waiting for you to go back to bed?"
"You went into my room-?"
"Does she have a name?"
"Sam," I said.
"A woman named Sam?"
"Samara," I said, "But I just call her Sam."
"Would you consider your relationship with, ah, Sam, serious?"
"I'm not sure what this has to do with anything."
"It doesn't matter what you're sure of," my psychiatrist said, "Now. Tell me. Do you love her?"
"Well. I suppose I do."
"Are you sleeping with her?"
"Sleeping with her?-"
"Yes. Sleeping with her. Sex. Coitus. The beast with two backs. You dig?"
"I don't know what-"
"Fucking, Osiris. That's what I'm talking about. Fucking."
"Osiris?"
"Yes, I'm trying the name on you. I think it fits you. Back to the question. Are you fucking her?"
"I suppose I am."
"Hmm," he breathed more smoke, "Typical."
"Typical? What's that supposed to mea-"
"-Looks like our time is up for tonight." He clicked the latches on his briefcase one last time and rose from the table. "I'll be in contact with you."
I watched my psychiatrist, with his brisk, marionette-limb movements and stiff hands, stub his cigarette out right there on my table, and leave.
My psychiatrist gives me pills; the angry red ones that make me jump right out of my spine, the soft blue ones the size of my thumbnail that have me on the floor, weeping, seeing hands come straight out of the ceiling, wanting to touch, grasp, wriggle. I don't like taking the medicine, but he says it necessary, says he'll hold me down, throw the pills in my mouth, and close my jaws shut like I'm a goddamned dog if he has to. He says that this body does not belong to me, never belonged to me, that I have taken human eyes and human hands that did not belong to me, forgotten my purpose, lost memories in the slack grip, in fingernails and nerve endings, muscles and heart tissue. If I wanted those memories back, I needed to take my medicine.
"And what if I don't want the memories?" I asked.
"Pardon me," he said, "Did I give you the impression it was your choice?"
He does not like Samara.
"How long have you known Sam?" he asked me once.
"I guess it's been a few years now."
"I find that odd."
"What do you find odd?"
"That one of us could be with a human for so long. A strange phenomenon really, how they reject us. We did research on that a few years back. Turns out it's because of our pheromones. They don't like our smell."
I said nothing.
"You do know what that probably means. Don't you?"
"No. Not really."
"You might have stopped producing the pheromones. It means you're in this thing deep. Personally, I blame the girl."
"Sam?"
But I do have to say, you sure know how to pick them out," he smiled, "girlfriend's got killer legs."
He left me another bottle of medicine - the big, saucer-shaped tablets that gave me bad dreams.
"I'd like you to end your relationship with her, but of course, at the moment, that seems rather out of the question. You think you're human. You're rebellious, paranoid, stubborn, and of course, suffering under the delusion that she actually cares about you."
"You don't know-"
"-Now I think," he said, interrupting me, "That when we've progressed far enough in our treatment, you will blossom like a pretty and young spring flower. Your eyes will be opened. You'll want to end things, maybe even be disgusted by her...her alien-ness, her humanness."
"How can you even assume-"
"-Ah ah ah, Osiris," my psychiatrist said, "You have to work on your anger issues, you know that. And besides, times up."
I don't sleep very well anymore. Not after my psychiatrist told me that I was not born here in Manhattan, but somewhere very far away, a gray planet with gray waters tipping on the edge of a solar system so far away the light from its stars drowns in black holes before reaching Earth. My psychiatrist says the planet is beautiful, even in its death throes, but I cannot fathom a place that has no skyscrapers and strawberry gardens, no western sunsets, late night cinema, or warm human skin.
And I get such strange thoughts. Strange thoughts I never thought to think. I'm becoming unhinged. My psychiatrist says that means the medicine is working.
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