DOCTOR KYOTO TAKEI

ON PATIENT Ryou Bakura

AS OF THE fourteenth SESSION

                NOTES:

Patient has ceased to show any signs of self-mutilation.

As his outward mannerisms become more docile and typical of a boy his age, the journal entries he willingly allows me to glimpse continue to grow darker and more desperate.

He insists he is doing better than when our sessions first started, but I'm convinced his sociological sense of reality is tragically skewed.

Schoolwork and studies achieve 'A' marks.

Outbursts and lapses in memory have ceased.

The boy is complying with all prescription orders.

                DIAGNOSIS:

Patient is pulling a façade in order to appease his father, but is emotionally and socially crippling himself.

Hypnotism may supply insight to underlying mental conflict.

I have ruled out physical child abuse by the father—but there is no doubt in my mind of emotional and mental abuse.  The father may need to be referred to counseling as well.

                ATTATCHED:

I've included a journal entry yielded rather willingly.  I am inclined to believe the boy wants to be helped.  In any case, I can be sure he wants to be heard.

Dear Diary,

                The other day, father took me to a restaurant.  I still don't know the occasion.  We ate in silence—I ordered sukiyaki something or another.  I'm still getting used to this Japanese food.  Everything else is all right—I started learning the language when I was a toddler since dad planned to move here at one point anyway, so it comes rather naturally to me now.  I don't mind the odd traditional clothing either—they even have tea here.  So everything else is all right.  I just can't figure out this food.  Raw fish on rice and seaweed?  And they sell it for so much, too.  I'm starting to get the conversion from Yen in my head without even using a calculator.

                Hmm.  Where was I going?  Food, restaurant…ah.  While we were there, quiet as church mice, I looked over and who did I see sitting right beside me, hovering like Death itself?  None other than the one and only ghost haunting my mind (he says he's the Spirit of the Ring, whatever that means) sitting there—right there—in the flesh.  Ha!  Now father could see.  Now he could know I'm not crazy.  Now they all could understand—except I saw the waitress behind him where I shouldn't have been able to see anything but clothes and skin, but there she was, and the far wall and all the customers in between.  He was there, but he wasn't.

                And as I began to glance around the restaurant, I realized to my dismay that no one else could see him but me.  The waitress who'd been taking an order behind him even turned around, turned right around and walked past him, walked through him.  Her elbow cut right through his shoulder—passed through flesh and muscle and bone like it was air.  It was air.  It was nothing, and he was nothing and then I saw with alarm that he'd been staring very hard at me that whole time, the corner of his mouth upturned in a haughty sneer.  I'm not hallucinating, I kept telling myself.  I'm not.  He's real enough, I know.  I know he's real.  He's just…invisible.

                I was scared and so stopped looking at him and he disappeared sometime after, though not for good.  That whole thing's not really what's on my mind, anyway.  See, it got me thinking about something—about how kids have imaginary friends.  I never had one, so I don't know, but when I lived back in England, there was this little whelp—I remember—he had an imaginary friend and he was proud of it.  The rest of us regarded him as odd for as long as I knew him, but he didn't care.  The strange thing about him was that he never said "imaginary."  He said "invisible."

                It could be that this bloke had a wildly vivid imagination; his pretense became so real that, in his mind, it actually existed.  Or it could be that, as any small child, he could easily get words mixed up and either no one cared to correct him, or the blunder had been uttered so many times that the notion had been forever lodged in the childish part of his brain, sentenced to chase around sticky-sweet memories of mud pies and tongue baths from a large furry dog—perhaps named Nana—until this kid is a grown man.  I'll never know which.  And I guess it doesn't matter.

                But I found myself walking around today contemplating the self-same enigma.  People can last their whole childhoods convinced that the bogeymen live in their closets, or that monsters wait under their beds.  The job of the parents is to calm their nerves—they open the door, turn on the light and look under the bed—nope, nothing here, 'night sweetheart.  But as soon as the light's back off, the darkness swirls again in threatening shapes and the monsters return to whisper in their ears.  They exist.  They're real enough, all children know.  So why can't anyone else see them?  Why won't anyone else believe?

                Kids are funny that way.  They can go their whole lives as children convinced of the most absurd things.  Bogeymen.  Ha!  Of course, I myself have never been afraid of such things.  The closet doesn't scare me.  I'm not afraid of the shadows on the walls or anything hiding under my bed.  How foolish would that be?  There's only one thing in this world that scares me.  And he was staring smiling at me in a restaurant the other day.  And I saw him, though no one else did, although he was there, although I know for a fact that he exists.

                Then it occurred to me—what if there are no such things as "imaginary" friends?  What if they're all just "invisible"?

AFTERNOTE ATTATCHED:

Father declined at mention of hypnotic therapy for the boy.