The shimmer, in clinical practice, could be extended. Not indefinitely and not without cost, but enough. A practitioner trained in the extension technique could hold the pre-choice interval open for a client who needed more time inside it, long enough to know both paths from the inside before the split occurred. Three weeks was the standard limit. Some practitioners ran longer; Boen did not. She had seen what happened at five and six weeks and she had not liked it.
Her current client had been in the extension for twenty-two days. The decision involved leaving a city, leaving a job, and leaving a relationship that had lasted eleven years; the three were not separable. The client had needed to feel both versions: the one in which she stayed and the one in which she went. For three weeks she had felt both equally. This was the point of the extension. This was also why it had to end.
Boen guided the collapse over the course of the session. There was a protocol. The client sat across from her and reported what each path felt like, and Boen reflected this back in the clinical language, and gradually the two paths became distinguishable from each other, and then one became more present, and then the client said: that one.
The shimmer collapsed. The extension ended. The client sat quietly for a moment.
She said: both answers were true at the same time for three weeks.
Boen said: yes.
She said: and now only one is.
Boen said: the choice doesn't reveal which was more true. It only ends one of them.
The client nodded. She gathered her coat. The session was over.
Boen stayed to close the room. In her coat pocket she had been carrying a card for three years: the address of a person she had not decided to visit. She had been in the shimmer about it since the summer before last. She was not running the extension protocol on herself; you couldn't, or at least you weren't supposed to. But the shimmer could sustain on its own in someone who knew how to keep it open, and Boen had known how for fifteen years.
She locked the session room. She did not take the card out of her pocket. She walked to the parking lot in the cold.