Having no context for who this afternoon’s mystery Normal was, why did I not hesitate in the least to reveal that he and Doug were one?
How extensive a list could I compile of male Normal clients with stifled dreams?
Was it this Normal’s wife who had called to eagerly arrange sessions at which I would be tasked with helping her husband let go of false, dissociative personas?
Wait, does Bing have a wife?
I am sure I remember at least one Normal wife shouting furiously in my office about how her Normal man always wrote plans instead of sitting to watch TV with her.
Regardless, why choose that particular moment to disassemble Doug for good—sans both the [possible] wife in attendance and usual fostering of a natural Sticking or Breaking Point?
Could it have been Mr. Rolman?
Did the one today show signs of mental decline and poverty?
Does Mrs. Rolman watch TV?
After the unknown Normal left, I fully intended to shift my focus back to Ray’s case notes.
Yet I could not escape a compulsive urge to dig through my old scattered notes on Normals instead, knowing upfront I would fail to locate that elusive, connecting, cornerstone piece: the specific activity today’s Normal has or had always planned to do, and then began accomplishing through Doug.
Was it music, writing, comedy, school…?
Bing has a wife, right?
Would Bing’s wife be the same sort of person as Mrs. Rolman and Caylee?
Wait . . . why Caylee?
I sat dead still, shuffling through various combinations like blind memories of countless disjointed components which might have all once linked to form some unknown, perfect, grand machine—a search that had always played out the same way, at least in its simplicity: in feverish pursuit of that single fabled crossover place where clockwork gears could all clink together and simultaneously wind myriad tubes through their million individually matching threads.
Yet all I kept arriving at was that Bing was the closest Outlier to Normal, where Ray was always furthest away.
So, what about Caylee then?
Why would Caylee be…?
And where might I, myself, fit along my own continuum?
Oddly enough, I had never considered it.
I don't know anything 