Lucy A. McLaren

My next counselling session is with Alexander (Alex) Southerland from Douglas Lumsden’s Alexander Southerland, P.I. series. From within his tough exterior, Alex started to show some of his inner thoughts and feelings. Only some, though. He wasn’t too eager to delve too deep.

The counselling session follows…

Assessment Form 

Name: Alexander Southerland 

Age: 30 

Reason for seeking counselling: Part of a sentencing arrangement after conviction on a bogus assault charge. 

Have you tried counselling before?: No. 

How do you feel about being here?: If this is what I have to do in order to avoid jail time, then so be it. 

Do you have any goals for counselling?: To get through it as painlessly as possible. 

Is there anything else you’d like me to know before your session?: No. 

Counselling Session 

Lucy: Hello, welcome to your counselling session. It’s nice to meet you. Thank you for completing the assessment form. That just gives me a bit of background information on you, but I will allow you to lead the session and speak about whatever you want to. I’m Lucy and I’ll be your counsellor for today. Now, first thing’s first—what is your preferred name to go by? 

Alex: You can call me Alex. 

L: Okay, Alex, great. So, you noted in your assessment that you’re here as part of a sentencing arrangement after a conviction. It sounds as though you’re not keen on counselling but it’s a means to avoiding jail time, and the fact that it was a bogus assault charge must have been really difficult for you. Like I said, I’ll let you lead the session–I’m not here to tell you what to do or say. With that in mind, is there anything that you feel you might benefit from speaking about while you’re here? 

A: I don’t know. I don’t really think I need counselling. I mean, sure, life is tough, and you gotta make your own breaks in this world. Nobody owes you nothin’, unless you’ve done something for them. I get along okay. Hitting 30 was kind of a shock, but it beats dying, right?  

L: Well, you’re here now, so we may as well see if you get anything from the session. You never know, you might find it helps. You say nobody owes you nothing and life is tough, and you were shocked to turn 30. I get the impression that you’re someone who has relied on yourself for so long, you don’t really like to discuss your feelings with anyone.  

A: No one wants to hear me whine. Besides, I got nothin’ to complain about. What do you want to hear? That my father was a mean drunk? And that my mother was the wife of a mean drunk? So what? They did the best they could, and they weren’t any worse than most. I was an only child, and I was one child more than they wanted, probably. One more than they could handle, that’s for sure. But that’s not their fault. You take what life gives you and you do the best with it, and that’s what they did. I found out that the less time I spent with them, the better we all liked it. I spent a lot of time out in the neighborhood with other kids like me. We did what aimless tough kids do, and I learned to fight. I liked fighting, and I got to be pretty good at it. Then I went off to do my mandatory three years with the Dragon Lord’s army, but I’m not gonna talk about that. My folks bought it while I was away. So, yeah, I rely on myself. Always have. It’s worked out okay. And now I’m 30. I’m still around, so, like I say, I can’t complain. 

L: You speak very matter-of-factly about your life and all you’ve been through, as though it’s no big deal and you just are where you are and you don’t feel very much either way about that…  but the experiences you had in your past shaped who are today. It seems like things may have been pretty tough for you growing up, with a mean drunk of a father and a mother who didn’t protect you from him. You found solace in fighting, I wonder whether that was because physical pain gave you a way to deal with your emotional pain.  

A: Hmm… That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. You might be on to something, Lucy. I’ll tell you what, though: I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’d much rather deal with physical pain than my emotions. I can get through physical pain. My military training included techniques for resisting torture. And something else happened to me, too, about a year ago. I can’t talk about it, but as a result I heal pretty fast, so I’m not as afraid of damage to my body as I probably should be. In my line of work I run into some violent situations on occasion. When I’m trying to solve a case, sometimes the best way to go forward is to lead with my chin and see who takes a poke at it. It’s not always pleasant. There was this troll, a detective at the local cop shop. A real bruno. He bounced me off the walls a few times, just for the fun of it. Really knocked me for a loop. Drugged me up once and tortured me with his knuckles and some really bad moonshine. Then he got himself an ice pick and…. Well, anyway, I recovered, and I’m a helluva lot better off than he is these days, that’s for sure. But emotional pain? Yeah, I’d just as soon shove that into a back room in my mind and forget about it. And I’m fine with that. 

L: You’d much rather deal with physical pain than your emotions—to the point that it seems to me you’d sooner repeatedly go through that horrific torture at the hands of the detective you spoke of than face your emotional pain. It can be so hard at times to even know how to put our emotional pain into words, yet I think your thoughts on physical pain say a lot. It tells me that your emotional pain is there and it makes itself known from time to time, but you push it to the back of your mind, lock it away and get on with your life. And you’ve done that for as long as you can remember.  

A: Sure, but what’s wrong with that? I come across some emotional people sometimes. My lawyer, Rob Lubank, for example. You might have heard of him. A gnome with a really bad hairpiece. Best defense attorney in Yerba City. I do a lot of work for him, and I guess you could say he’s a friend, even though we’re not exactly drinking buddies. Rob’s not an easy guy to like, but he’s gone out of his way to help me out of some jams. I think he likes the fact that I tend to get myself into a lot of legal trouble. I always seem to owe him money, and he knows I’m good for it. He thinks of me as a reliable source of income. Anyway, he’s angry ALL. THE. TIME! Real foulmouthed little bastard. Wears his emotions on his sleeve. Works for him, I guess, but I just can’t go around yelling and screaming all the time the way he does. It’s a wonder more people don’t take a poke at him, but he’s a clever little rascal. Besides, he’s a sleazy blackmailer with files on every important operator in the city. If anyone crossed him, he’d ruin their lives so bad they’d never be able to show their faces in town again…. Huh! I think I lost track of what we were talking about. Funny. I don’t usually talk this much. I hope I’m not babbling on too much. I’m the kind of joe who likes to sit quietly in the corner of the gin joint with a bottle of whiskey and watch the other people babble. In fact, that’s pretty much my hobby. 

L: You’re not babbling at all. Perhaps these are things you’ve wanted to say for a long time but haven’t known how. You use your lawyer as an example of an emotional person, but it strikes me that the only emotion you describe him as showing is anger. That’s an emotion we all feel, of course, and it’s completely healthy to do so. But sometimes, anger can be a cover for other emotions that we might be feeling like fear, worry or sadness. When anger is explosive like that—yelling and screaming—it’s generally coming from that place, covering for another emotion. It’s interesting that you see your lawyer’s anger as him wearing his emotions on his sleeve; I wonder if anger is the main emotion you’ve witnessed in your life, and the main one you associate with when I talk about emotional pain.  

A: Well, I’ve seen lots of anger. There’s a lot of shi…, er, stuff out there to be angry about. Sorry. I didn’t mean to lose my composure. It can be frustrating. There is so much that is out of our control The Dragon Lords run this planet, and they’re immortal, unkillable, magical killing machines, and there isn’t a fu… damned thing anyone can do about it. Their secret police—the Lord’s Investigation Agency—can make people disappear so completely that even their own mothers will forget they gave birth to them. Not that I have anything against the Dragon Lords, but, if I did, it wouldn’t even matter. That’s just the way things are. The way I figure it, the most I can do is to try to make my immediate environment a little better. And I try. That’s why I’m a private investigator. But I can’t touch the big stuff. And… maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this…. This is all confidential, right? 

L: Yes, everything you tell me is confidential.  

A: It turns out that elves, the original rulers of this world, are real. I know, it sounds crazy. They were supposed to have been eliminated after humans betrayed them seven thousand years ago and helped the Dragon Lords take the world away from them. But I’ve met one. He gave me that healing power that I mentioned earlier, and some other gifts, besides. So even though I didn’t ask for it, I’ve made good use of those gifts. They’ve saved my life on more than one occasion. Which means I owe him. And he’s involved in some kind of long-range plan to overthrow the Dragon Lords and send them back to Hell where they came from. The last thing I want is to be in the middle of some big world-shaking conflict, but, like I said, I owe the elf, and I always pay what I owe.  

Thing is, I don’t know if I want the Dragon Lords to be overthrown. I don’t have a problem with them, and I sure don’t want to come to their attention! And I don’t know that we’d be better off under the elves. They ruled us long ago, and I guess we didn’t like it. For centuries mothers have been telling stories about bloodsucking elves who terrorize naughty children in order to keep them in line. The elf I met seems okay, but he’s got a secret connection to the Hatfield crime syndicate, and I don’t want anything to do with them. It’s complicated. It’s a frustrating mess, actually. All I want to do is live my life without anyone telling me what to do, and now I’ve suddenly got all these ties to shady characters, and I’m smack dab in the middle of some high-level power struggle that I don’t understand. I feel like I’m under water, and it’s all I can do to breathe. It’s no wonder I have nightmares nearly every night. Good thing I don’t need much sleep. 

L: That sounds like a lot to deal with, Alex. And you don’t need to apologise if you swear. You’re welcome to say anything—I’m here to listen, not to judge. It seems as though you find yourself a little stuck now, unsure on where to go next. On one hand, this elf gave you healing powers which have saved your life more than once, so you feel you owe him. But you’re not sure about getting involved in a rebellion against the Dragon Lords. From a personal perspective, you don’t have a problem with them and you’d rather avoid coming to their attention. That feeling of being underwater, it’s like you’re being crushed by this sense of responsibility on one hand, and the desire to remain anonymous on the other. You’re at an impasse and it’s putting a lot of pressure on you. So let me ask you, if you could wake up tomorrow morning and have your life exactly how you want it—how would that look? 

A: Like I want it? Hmm…. I’m just a working-class joe, Lucy. I just want to bring in enough dough to pay my rent and keep gas in the beastmobile. That’s my oversized car that I picked up from the proprietor of an escort agency. I’m good at what I do, and I want to keep doing it. The PI business is all about uncovering information, and I have a nose for it. I’m an air elementalist, which means that I have the ability to summon and command air elementals, if they aren’t too big. I’ve trained a little two-inch puff of whirling air I named Smokey to be a useful tool. It can go just about anywhere unseen, and it’s got a good memory for overheard conversations. I’ve trained a bigger elemental that I named Badass to provide me with some extra muscle when things get dicey. That twister packs enough punch to push over a small automobile.  

So what I’m saying is that between my own skills and my elementals, I’m a handy gee to call on if you need a professional snoop, especially if you need someone who isn’t afraid to stray a bit beyond what’s strictly legal. I like my work, but I like it best when it’s routine. Do the job, collect the dough, give me a call if you ever need me again. The problem is that I’ve kind of made a name for myself, and I’ve been finding myself forced to work for some rich and powerful assholes who wanted to treat me like one of their flunkies instead of as an independent professional. Other than that, I like my weekly poker nights with Gio and his pals. Gio’s the mechanic who keeps the beastmobile in good shape. He’s a good mug. I’d like to maybe not have to miss so many of those poker games, but my job doesn’t exactly have regular hours. I like drinking alone, but I miss my friend Crawford. He’s a were-rat, a shapeshifter who transforms into a swarm of rats. Yeah, I know: were-rats tend to be psychotic. But Crawford’s a good mug. A little twitchy, maybe, but a decent gee. Unfortunately, he ran into a little trouble with the LIA—the Lord’s Investigation Agency. I don’t want to say anything more about that.  

How would I like my life to be? I wish I could sleep without dreaming about vengeance demons and shapeshifting monsters ripping my arms out of their sockets and sadistic trolls with ice picks and giant hummingbird gods trying to eat my heart. I’d like to see a little more justice in this world. Good deeds should be rewarded, and the bad guys should get what’s coming to them. I’d like to live in a world where Gio’s teenaged son Antonio can follow in his old man’s footsteps and be free to work on cars without getting pressured to run with a street gang, and where Detective Kalama’s daughter Nalani can build a nice life for herself without falling in love with some bruno who feels threatened by her smarts and uses her as a punching bag when he gets drunk. But the world is what it is, and there’s not much I can do about it.  

Bottom line? I want my debts paid, my hand filled with aces, my beer cold, my whiskey smooth, my deep-fried calamari fresh and tender, and the waitress who brings it to me to have nice gams and maybe flirt with me a little. And corrupt cops, dirty politicians, elves, Dragon Lords, and the LIA off my back. That would be a good life. Too bad it’s all just a fantasy. Like I said, the world is what it is, and that’s all it’s going to be. You either accept it or you take a one-way walk into the ocean, and I don’t like to get wet. 

L: So, ultimately, there are things that you could change in your life, things that could perhaps be easier for you but… you accept the world as it is. You’re a straight-forward person and you see the way things are. I get the feeling that there are things in your life you get a real sense of satisfaction—maybe even enjoyment—from, and you wouldn’t want them any other way. I feel like that’s a good place to conclude the session, what do you think? 

A: Whew! Thanks, Lucy. I haven’t talked so much in one sitting since I can remember. I guess that means you did your job. I hope you’ll put in a good word for me with the judge. It really was a bum rap.  

Oh, one thing. I know that you said our session was confidential, but I expect you’ll be running into a two-and-a-half-foot tall little fellow with scary eyes and a mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. His name is Ralph, and he’s from the LIA. He’ll want to know what I told you. My advice is to go ahead and cooperate with him. He’s LIA, and he can ruin you if you don’t, and, anyway, he already knows most of what I told you. But tell him I said to go easy on you. Demand that he at least be polite. Remind him that I know his secret, and that I’m not afraid to use it against him. Tell him if he gets rough, I’ll lock him up in my laundry room and he can have another go with the psychotic goat-creature that I let board there. Don’t worry, you should be okay. He and I are actually something like, well, not friends exactly, but we’re on the same side most of the time.  

Anyway, it was good talking things out with you. I think maybe I needed this. But, and please don’t take offense at this, I’m not coming back unless the judge makes me. If you’re ever at the Black Minotaur, and you happen to see me at the bar, stop by and say hello. I’ll introduce you to Smokey. 

L: Thanks for letting me know, Alex—I’ll remember! It was good meeting you. Take care, perhaps I will see you at the Black Minotaur one day. 

You can find out more about Douglas Lumsden and his books at his author website.