I want to sink into this chair.
I nearly anticipate a pulse underneath the arms of the leather, flayed flesh, a sacrifice as testament to the magnificent weight of human evolution. Quasi-respectful, I think, that something should, in death, become a chair. It's an expensive chair, but it's still just a chair.
It's our right as conquerors; we domesticate animals, hunt them, kill them, eat them, and the power sustained only further establishes our place as the true owners of this Earth. My vegetarian palate, however, can only fantasize about the prodigious power that must come from Thyestean destruction, to consume something that you know could kill you. I don't dwell on it more than necessary; the romanticized air rolling through my brain like a perfumed breath is quickly quelled by the scientific sterility of the reality of eating: energy transfer. Decay back into the recycled circle of preservation of organic matter. There's nothing inspiring or idealistic about biological processes.
The constant ebb and flow of my whims dragging me down to the depths of the most despicable realms of fantasy and falsified caprices before I'm surfacing into the biting wind of the sterile reality of the nature of my work is driving me crazy. Not literally, of course: I'm not a nut case, I'm not going to end up in the hospital under Dr. Chilton's watchful eye and sterile white hospital lights. I cling to therapy sessions like life vests in a swampy ocean.
The exhaustion rots at my bones and makes itself tangible as bruised halos framing my eyes like a crown I wish would adorn my head, sallow skin and shallow breaths. I severely underestimated how taxing this job would be, a constant erosion at my faith in humanity, a musician plucking at strings on a mandolin and severing cords acting as my hope in God's mercy. Even with this misery, I'm keenly aware of the various barriers erected between me and my work, and my disdain for Will inevitably, like an alchemist turning lead to gold, melts to pity. Sympathy. I wouldn't say I empathize, I understand or I relate to him, but I know. I know very well.
Alana Bloom has auburn curls that bob around her slender, swan-like neck. Her presence is eternally more soothing than Dr. Lecter; fluid, relaxed, compassionate and invested, the need to record my minute movements and anticipate reactions to my actions and decree them favorable and hospitable or distrustful and disgusted dissipates. You poise yourself to talk to Dr. Lecter: with Dr. Bloom, I'm malleable as pure gold. She has quips, cues, little nods of the head and ways to look at me with almost maternal affection that get me to spill it all.
She asks me how I'm handling everything, and I say the opposite of what I typically tell Dr. Lecter. Patient confidentiality, of course, prohibits her from telling him.
"The reality of a situation can never be gauged with artificial substitution—practice, tests and simulations will never prepare you for the weighty realness of this work. Not everyone is meant for it," she soothes, doing her best to insulate the gentle suggestion of "you ought to quit," and she exhales carefully, her collarbones bending inwards as her chest deflates.
"I worked this hard to get here. I'm not going to give up. It's just taking some getting used to," I retort, my voice astringently resistant to her kindness. She nods, face blank and the color of talc.
"I understand. Take your health into consideration. Deciding to stay in the FBI in a different sect instead of a special investigator might suit you just as well as this current job." Implying that I fit this position, fill in this Will Graham-shaped gap. "Don't worry about your safety, though," she stresses, the slightest tarnishing of warning marring her green eyes. I might be unhealthy, depressed, anxious, but I will be safe: I won't be dangerous, like Will Graham, incited to commit the terrors I strove to prohibit. I will not be harmed or targeted. This is just a simulation, and I can back out of it at any time.
Dr. Lecter's greatest fear was me chewing on my nails when I visited him, mistaking bloody fingertips for anxiety produced from work-related stress rather than the natural reaction to being in his presence: Alana fears for my moral compass.
"Your personal life is strictly to be divided from your work. They don't interlap! That's such a surefire way of letting work-related misery and stress ruin your daily routine," she presses, further venturing, "and I recommend that you ensure you've got solid hobbies. Anything in particular? Nothing passive, like reading. Let's try to get you to divide your surroundings into three separate hemispheres: work, home and leisure."
The idea is nice. I, however, admit I have no hobbies. I studied, then I worked, then I trained, and now I investigate.
She nods. Closed eyes, closed mouth, soft expression: she isn't angry. "Spend time with other people, then, people who don't work with you. Not me, not Jack, not Beverly..."
As if I'd willingly spend time with Jack Crawford.
"…Not me, not Dr. Lecter."
It's an impulse reaction, an indignant frown and a furrowed brow. Concentration easily to be mistaken for anger: I just can't help seizing up when I hear his name. I'm still so captivated, still so hyper-aware of every interaction we have.
I replay our last conversation over Dr. Bloom's voice. Something about orchestras, I guess, how he detests that people could confuse a violin and a viola, a clever joke about bass as in the instrument versus bass as in the fish, polite, stifled laughter and hands hung at his sides. "That's too bad," I say, my voice lax and bitter, distant and detached in my quest for total apathy. His name hangs in my head like a funeral wreath draped around a stone angel's neck; his words are a pleasant roucoulement, diction laced as tight as a tapestry: I can't fathom a world devoid of him and his perfect presence. It's more than a daydream, it's a fantasy.
"Too bad," she repeats, spinning silk and making a puzzle like a spider. She uses the same enunciation, the same nod and tilt of the head. I wonder why she decided to select his name last, make him the end of a row of books, the final word in a thought—I mean, I know why, but I wonder why she thought this was appropriate.
"This is," she clarifies, "your therapy session." Holds her hands up, a polite gesture of surrender. "But I have something to tell you."
"Shoot."
"When I was little, I was in Model United Nations. Pretty standard stuff—high school after school club, if you don't know. It's based around debating. Political simulation." Her exposition is standard, padding for the truth she strives to reveal. "We had a policy: No MUNcest. No one in the program could date another person in the program." A scoff, a wry smile, she twists the ring on her hand in a gesture of humility and nervousness despite the fact that her eyes are steady on mine. "It was for professionalism. You have the relationship, you break up: would you be able to maintain the aura of business partners, of comrades or opponents in a debate? It was better to just be…separate."
"You think I'm going to actually be eloquent and straightforward enough to establish a relationship with Dr. Lecter and then end it," I say in disbelief, frustrated at her euphemisms and paltry comparisons to my vivid dilemma, but she grins, holding her hands up in a silent gesture of I got you.
She coaxed it out of me. I feel stupid, like I fell for the trap, a rat in a maze who thought it had the whole world only to get the walls broken down and eye-fulls of the white laboratory surrounding him. Alana is clever, I admit, though she is disgustingly frustrating.
"Hannibal is not a very…relationship oriented person," she confines, the dropping of his proper title almost assuring me that he can hear the twinges of disrespect ruining my ethos. "Trying to pursue someone almost twenty years older than you will be frustrating and the inability to remain professional at work will tarnish the atmosphere."
"Who says I was going to?" I snap, defensive, and the tepid buds of humiliation bloom in my skin. Gooseflesh: I'm suddenly cold, despite how warm my face is, and I gag as I attempt to swallow, my saliva sticky and tacky. Tastes like rot: I am rotting. This obsession is decaying and maiming me beyond recognition; how pathetic would I see myself if I caught a glimpse of what I've become? I work for myself and strive for self-gain, not for others.
Other people were never a variable in the equation that I anticipated would lead my life.
"I just don't want you to be disappointed," she affirms. A nod of her head, she extends her hand slightly to rest atop mine, milk-pale skin and pale manicured nails. The contrast makes me think she's a ghost.
In context, I don't know what she thought I would be disappointed in. Would I be disappointed in him, in myself, in his actions, in my actions to his actions, in what we'd make, in the situation we'd form? I am already disappointed, I thought as I said goodbye and walked out the door, so I'll take this chance for a tiny scrap of meaning.