"Peacock Therapy," part 3.1

III.

Throughout the following morning—walking to Montauk High, squeezing down crowded hallways, sulking in first period study hall—Corbin had tried his best to keep his mind from straying back to the peacocks, or otherwise evoking a recrudescence of the image. The route from his house to the school a mile and half away ran along the same expressway that let onto the gravel thoroughfare to Peacock Grove. As he approached this turnout, Corbin practiced the first aversion technique Dr. Phillpots had showed him: he rapidly clenched and released his fists, inhaled deeply, and held his breath, so that a tingling began to work its way up his neck. This tingling permitted him to pass the turnout without surrendering to the urge to bolt down it, despite catching the far-off echoes of a peacock’s “nee-ow-ow!”

In study hall, Corbin’s eyes strayed from the “Common Law and Constitutional Courts” chapter of his American Civics Now! textbook to the poster tacked up on a corkboard in the corner. The infographic poster, dusted with chalk, featured an array of Jurassic fossils, sweeping arrows, fine-print columns, and the title “Archaeopteryx: Very Early Bird,” all orbiting a central painting of this interstitial creature. The painting’s vibrant cobalt feathers made Corbin nervous, so he decided to deploy the second method he had learned from Dr. Phillpots, the covert conditioning technique of calling up negative counter-images to associate with the peacock. He closed his eyes and imagined that the sight of a peacock caused hot urine to spread across his crotch as onlookers snickered. The dread brought on by this exercise finally pushed him to return to his reading assignment.

By third period computer lab, Corbin’s worries began to pullulate. Neither the fist pumping exercise nor the urine vision were managing to quell his desire to escape back to the peacocks anymore. Thus, he reverted to his own method of systematic desensitization: he pulled up a cache of peafowl image files from a cloud drive and made hard copies on the color printer after the lab monitor stepped out. He also grabbed a pair of steel sheers from the supply cabinet. At lunch twenty minutes later, he found a dirt patch to sit on under a hawthorn tree, behind the cafeteria’s cement patio, and laid the pictures out around him. He pulled out two covert feathers from the Grove and placed them beside the pictures. He then picked up an image of a peacock perched on a headstone outside a Yazidi shrine and began cutting around the painted eyes at the tips of its raised train.

“Nice strokes. Very smooth,” a breathy female voice spoke in Corbin’s left ear, raising the hair on his arms. The shears stopped cutting.