The post-correction counseling protocol was eight sessions, renewable by referral. Covel was in her sixteenth session, which was not standard. Her counselor had been clear about this: the research showed most patients stabilized within four to seven years. Covel was at year seven.
She was, by most measures, stable. She had returned to full-time work. She had sustained a friendship. She was not experiencing the disorientation episodes that had characterized the first year. The counselor used the word adjusted.
Covel used the word different.
The session today was review. Progress, setbacks, ongoing symptoms. The counselor ran through the list. At the end, she asked: is there anything you want to discuss that we haven't addressed?
Covel thought about how to say it.
She said: I want to know what this room holds.
The counselor waited.
"I've been coming here for two years. I've sat in this chair sixteen times. Before the correction, I would have known. Not the number. The weight of it. The particular quality of what accumulated in a room where someone came repeatedly to try to put something difficult into words. I would have walked in here that first session and known what the room had been holding. Now it's just a room."
"Does that cause you distress?"
"No. It's a loss. I used to walk into any space and know something about it, what had been there, whether something had resolved or was still open, whether the last person left in difficulty or in ease."
She looked at the window. The afternoon light was ordinary.
"I didn't know I was doing it," she said. "I thought it was occasional. Something I sometimes noticed. But I was using it in every conversation. Every meeting. Every room I walked into. Forty years of reading the residue of things. And then the correction and none of it."
"What do you use instead?"
"I ask. I check. I look at people's faces the way people who never had the displacement look at faces, for information." She paused. "It's slower. And people don't always know what they're carrying. The residue is more honest than what people say."
The counselor wrote something.
"What did you just write?" Covel asked.
The counselor looked up.
"I want to know what that note holds," Covel said. "I can't tell."
The counselor set down the pen.
Covel sat with not knowing what had just been written about her. The room held its afternoon in silence. She could not read it.