He sat as he always did, with his feet in those big leather boots pointing squarely at me. Most people look at you with their eyes; Black Belt looked at you with his boots. Wherever those suckers were pointing was how you gauged the direction of his attention. I called him Black Belt in my head (and in my notes) for three reasons. First, I liked the sourness of it. It felt good to think and it felt good to write. Second, I always like to assign a private nickname for all my clients. It helps maintain my emotional boundary, to remember these people are not here so I can get to know them better or find some common ground between us. They’re not here because of all the little things I might find attractive or unattractive about them as individuals. They’re here because they have a problem, and so long as they’re paying me for the privilege, I’ll do my best to see it solved. And the third reason – the primary reason – why I called him Black Belt was to do with the nature of his particular problem. 

Our first encounter was about three months ago. Somebody from the hospital had called that morning with a new batch of referrals, about twenty or thirty in all. Shelly and I were sifting through the case files, trying to look for anything that seemed especially urgent – the hospital always marks everything urgent, so you have to pick your priorities – and to be honest, anything especially interesting. That might sound unprofessional, but the truth is that most people’s problems really aren’t all that unique. Ten years in this line of work takes its toll on your fascination, and you have to be fascinated if you want to really care, which I still did.

It was Shelly who pulled up the file on Black Belt. That was under his real name, of course – his given name. The picture alone made us stop. Everybody else looks straight into the camera when they have their portrait taken, so they seem to be looking right at you, gazing out through the file. I’m pretty sure the hospital tells you to do it, or else it’s just one of those instinctual things when somebody takes your picture – again, like making eye contact. But Black Belt wasn’t looking at the camera. His eyes were wide, a dull dark brown, but the whites were just a little too white; his focus had trailed just slightly downwards. Behind the camera. 

Scanning the file, Shelly quickly gave me the gist. No next of kin. No history. No criminal record. Worked at an insurance firm since the previous March – not a self-referral – his line manager had called it in. More than a year of troubled sleep. A voluntary round of hospital testing had yielded two outcomes, beside the referral to our clinic: a trial prescription of zolpaziclone, and a working diagnosis of rouchomania. 

The meds, I knew, were to treat insomnia. But as to whatever the hell rouchomania referred to, I was ready to go and rifle through my bookshelf to dust off my old dictionary of technical terms before Shelly helped me out. Aside from a minor in Classical Languages, she’s got kind of a photographic memory – one of the reasons I keep her around. Roucho, she told me, is Ancient Greek for garment. Our little daydreamer was, at least according to the attending physician who had seen him, pathologically obsessed with clothing. 

A week later Black Belt was sitting on my couch for the first time, with his big leather boots pointing squarely at me, and recounting for the first of many occasions, in that tired, almost bored manner which he always had, the recurring nightmare which formed the primary reason I chose his nickname. That’s my word, nightmare, not his – he never called it that. He always just called it The Dream. 

The Dream is always the same. It is extremely lifelike, and very realistic. At the time The Dream is happening, Black Belt always feels implicitly aware of its location, as well as the time – not only the time of day, but the time in his life at which the events are taking place – yet in the morning all these details fade to only vague impressions. He is certain he’s an adult when The Dream takes place, and he’s certain it’s happening sometime in his future, and that the location is somewhere he’s familiar with, or at least will be familiar with, though he’s not sure how intimately. He just knows it’s not a place that’s strange to him. 

In The Dream, Black Belt is looking at his own hands, which are clenched into fists. The skin is tight and tensing, he is looking at the blood underneath pulsing and flaring like small, slow fireworks. His knuckles are white, and the veins are bulging. He is exerting a great deal of effort. Stretched out in his hands is the same black leather belt he wears every day. He is pulling at both ends of it as hard as he possibly can. The belt is wrapped around a person’s neck – he does not know who – and Black Belt pulls and pulls and pulls until the neck gives in and crushes. It sounds and feels to Black Belt like a watermelon bursting, and for a moment, this fact is all he’s thinking of. But inevitably the horror of the action starts to dawn on him. His hands get tighter; he feels he’ll soon pass out, or throw up. He feels himself unable to breathe properly. He starts to panic; he starts to get angry. He pulls even harder at both ends of the belt and he clamps his eyes shut painfully tight. And then he wakes up. 

It was clear by the end of our first session that Black Belt considered this dream to be premonitory. It wasn’t just a possible future imagined in his mind, but a genuine vision of what was really going to happen. He once called it an ‘a posteriori memory’ – one of many things he said which surprised me early on, this time because I knew it was a term I recognised. I once took a course on parapsychology, and as disappointing as I’d found most of the content, a few ideas did stick with me – particularly some of the theories on trauma. Naturally, we tend to think of memory as the effect of some past cause; a real event needs to occur first in order to cause the memory second. But, according to certain, let’s say, less popular philosophies, just as a sufficiently traumatic event in the past can have strong effects on memory far into the future, so too could a future trauma create an a posteriori memory which chronologically precede the event itself. In which case, the memory is the causing event, and the real-world trauma is just the memory’s secondary effect. Memory becomes cause; inner and outer worlds are reversed.  

In one sense, we accept this kind of causality all the time. For instance, we might know on Tuesday that we’re going to be out of eggs by Thursday, and so we buy more on Wednesday, before the event occurs. Or for a less mundane example, none of us has yet experienced the event of our own death, yet it’s constantly affecting our decisions in the present. The root cause succeeds its own effects. Of course the obvious retort to that is that the genuine cause in such scenarios is not really the future event, but just our present-day prediction of it – and the prediction, naturally, occurs first. We learn, at some point, that we’re human, and that all human beings will die, then we use that knowledge to predict and prepare for future outcomes even though the actual event won’t happen until the very end of our lives.

This is the model of knowledge most people tend to use. Chronology aside, the main difference between it and the form of thought that we call memory is that memory’s supposed to correspond to past events that happened in the real world – the outer world – in provably specific ways. These details might be more or less accurate, but because the memory is little more than an echo of the event itself, we understand the accuracy will likely fade relative to how much time has passed since the event occurred. 

Like most people, I was always generally comfortable with that understanding. The only thing I’d add – and which was, for me, the grain of truth in the whole a posteriori memory thing, the reason it had stuck with me – was that the point about specificity works both ways. As in, it isn’t just that memories fade over time, but vice versa, our predictions of the future become clearer as the event draws closer. Fifty years in advance, you likely have next to no idea as to how or when you’re going to die – but five days beforehand, for most of us the picture is likely far more clear, the specificities far more accurate, let alone five hours, five minutes, five seconds. Obviously this applies less to extremely shocking or unpredictable events – but then again, traumatic events are often just as difficult to properly predict as they are to properly remember. The point is, the strength of our knowledge of any event is always proportional to its chronological distance from the present, regardless of whether it’s future or past. And anyway, that all assumes in the first instance that you believe in predestination – that time is fixed and there’s only one future waiting for us, rather than a sea of possibilities yet to be decided. 

Which not everybody does. But Black Belt certainly did. 

“If you’re so certain you’re going to hurt somebody with that specific belt,” I asked him, towards the end of that first session, “and you don’t want that to happen – then the obvious question is, why do you go around wearing it?” 

“I have to,” he said. “Belt should match the shoes.” 

Black Belt didn’t have any clothing-related trauma in his past. There was no abusive parental figure taking off their belt to whip him with, or forcing him to stare at his shoes while they did unspeakable things, or telling him he was too fat or too thin and that he needed to cover himself up or show himself off. At least, there was nothing like that which he or I ever uncovered. He was, simply, obsessed. His mind at practically all times was keenly focused on the outfit he was wearing, mentally checking and running through each different item, its function, and the internal consistency of the outfit as a whole (which, for the record, consisted solely of a pair of all-black, laceless leather boots, two black cotton socks, black slacks, black boxer briefs, a black leather belt with a black buckle, an all-black button-up shirt, a black vest, and, when necessary, an all-black button-up bomber jacket) and to a lesser extent, the outfits of everybody around him. He remembered and categorised people exclusively by the clothes they wore, and could recall countless cases of being unable to recognise others on occasion that they had sufficiently changed their clothes or worn things which, in Black Belt’s words, were ‘not right’. He was deeply avoidant of human nudity in any case, but primarily in himself, and claimed it had been years since any ‘slip-ups’ in this domain – to this end, he had long devised a complex means of maintaining personal hygiene, including washing and drying himself and his clothes while remaining fully dressed. For my part, I never noticed anything untoward about his cleanliness. On the contrary, in our sessions, he never once presented as anything less than exceptionally neat and well-groomed. His hair was naturally black, and he kept it short, and tightly combed. He was always clean-shaven, his nails were always clipped, his teeth were white, and while his skin seemed very pale, I could never really tell if that was only by comparison. His shirt was always buttoned to the top. His socks were always pulled up to the calf. In all our time together, I saw his hands, his face, and the top of his neck, and no other part of his body. He had always been this way, he told me, ever since he could remember. Just as he had always had The Dream.

It wasn’t always every night, at least, not as far as he recalled – and though he had long since ceased keeping track, he guessed it had probably always happened more nights than it hadn’t. The problem, now – the reason Black Belt had been referred to the hospital in the first place – was that recently it had begun to happen every single night. And that had been affecting his sleep. He’d been showing up to work extremely tired, even falling asleep at his desk more than once (only to have The Dream again and wake up with a start each time) and finding himself unable to fall asleep at night in anticipation of The Dream – ‘anticipation’, not fear, again, was his word. The insomnia medication was helping him sleep, but that only made the dreams more frequent. 

I can’t remember why, but at some point around our third weekly session I’d used the same phrasing in mentioning that he did not want his premonition to come true, and he – as he almost never did – interrupted to correct me. 

“You said that before. That I don’t want it to happen. That’s not right.”

I looked up from my notes, careful not to show any change in my expression.

“That’s not right,” Black Belt repeated. 

“So you’re saying,” I said, speaking neutrally, “that you do want to hurt someone? That there is someone, out there, whose neck you want to put that belt around?” That’s why you wear it, I thought, feeling on the cusp of some moment of revelation. I suppose, despite myself, I was always trying to understand him, even as I tried to help. But as he said: I wasn’t right.

“I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to hurt myself. I don’t want to have The Dream. I don’t want to wear this belt. I’m just – I’m doing it. I’m doing it. You can’t change who you are. What you’ll do. Any more than you can change what you did last week.”

“I’m going to imagine something,” I told him, “and I’d like you to imagine it with me, if that’s alright.” Black Belt said fine. “I’m imagining a future where you do take off that belt. A future where every single thing about you is the same, only you aren’t wearing it, at any given time. I know–” I said, raising my hands as he began to protest, “–that you aren’t really going to take it off. It’s only pretend. I just want to see if you can imagine it; imagine yourself, just as you are, exactly as you are, with only one, singular difference: you are no longer wearing that belt. Can you do that for me?”

Black Belt eventually agreed that he was able to imagine this. 

“Now. This version of yourself – does he still have The Dream?” Black Belt shook his head. “What sort of dreams does he have?” Black Belt said this version of himself would have an almost identical dream where he would wrap an almost identical belt around someone’s neck – only this belt had a grey buckle. I suggested that in my imagination, this version of Black Belt actually wore no belt at all. This was too much for him to comprehend.  

Over the course of our subsequent sessions, I did everything in my power to help Black Belt understand that the inner and outer worlds which our experience collects into a whole are not in fact one and the same. That they are in fact distinct. That the fundamental relationship between the two is one of an imbalance of power, cause, and effect; causal events occur in the outer world, and the mind translates them into experiences we have in the inner world. The outer world is fixed in time; the inner world is temporally fluid. Thus a traumatic event occurs at one moment, but the experience of that trauma for example may not occur until years afterwards, or it may occur slowly, in pieces, over many years, or it may seem to occur again and again long after the event has passed. That through this lens, we can begin to understand how the brain might even interpret the trauma from a repressed past event as a vision of the future. That this could be a self-defensive measure, to say that never really happened, that’s only a dream, that’s not real yet. 

You’ll recognise that by now, while I’d accepted there may have been no clothing-related trauma in Black Belt’s past, that didn’t dissuade me from presuming a trauma of some other type. If anything, his inability to recall anything that specific only supported the idea that the memory had been repressed and buried so far away from his waking mind that consequently his unconscious screamed of it near-constantly. My goal was always to help him, not to probe him, fascinated though I was – but in this case I had truly come to believe there was no way to end the dreams without exposing that root cause. 

Again to my surprise, Black Belt agreed with me wholeheartedly, and again began to speak about a posteriori memories with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm. 

“It’s the trauma of the future that my mind is trying to process. Pulsing out from the event like radiation. And it’s getting clearer now. I’m working backwards, so it’s getting worse. The future’s getting closer. If I close my eyes… I can almost see the place. The place it happens. It’s a place I know… I know it is. FUCK!”

I jumped, and cursed myself – thankfully he didn’t see. Black Belt had never sworn before. 

He opened his eyes. I didn’t think I’d ever seen someone look so tired. “I just wish I could remember.” 

It was in our final session that the real breakthrough came. Black Belt was on my couch, and sitting as he always did, with his feet in those big leather boots pointing squarely at me. By this point I’d been feeling fairly drained regarding his case, quite understandably. I’ve seen a lot of sadness in this job and had my share of failures. I try not to take on more responsibility than I should. Ultimately you can’t control what other people feel or think or do any more than you can control the tides, the clouds, the brightness of the stars. And that’s never what I set out to achieve. I just want to help solve people’s problems, if I can. Black Belt came to me with nightly dreams of future murder; if I could get it back down to even every other night, I’d decided I was prepared to take that as a victory. 

Black Belt’s boots were pointed squarely at me, his gaze drifting around the room as it often did. I was preparing to attempt some kind of conclusive statement summarising what we’d accomplished over the past twelve weeks. In terms of the root of the trauma, I would draw my conclusions at the level of simply saying that this young man had always felt very suffocated by his rigid fixations on clothing, that he was uninspired by the drudgeries of work and his near-nonexistent personal life, and that the best recommendation I could make in order to try to treat the nightly dreams was for him to change essentially every single thing about himself in order to move forward and grow into a healthier person.

“You’ve changed your belt,” he suddenly said. 

I never paid too much attention to my work outfit. Throughout my entire career, I had dressed each day more or less as anyone in this field is expected to; smart shirt, smart trousers, work shoes, and, should the need arise, occasionally a belt. I owned two belts that I was aware of: a brown leather one and a slightly darker brown leather one. Today I appeared to be wearing neither of these. Today I was wearing a black leather belt with a grey buckle. 

I tried to remember where in the world I had ever seen this belt before, much less purchased it for myself. I tried to remember putting it on this morning, and I couldn’t remember that either. And then all thinking ceased entirely, because Black Belt was standing up and walking slowly towards me. His eyes were locked on the belt around my waist. His fists were clenched. He seemed to be exerting some great physical effort. The veins on his neck were tense and his breathing was growing short. His nose was whistling. His knuckles were white. 

I wanted to stand up, but he was before me too quickly, and with one hand on my shoulder he kept me in my chair. His grip was very strong. I was suddenly shocked at how tall he was when he wasn’t sitting on my couch, how little I really knew of him, what incongruously good shape he was in. The thought of Black Belt sweating at the gym, pumping weights and running on the treadmill in his big black leather boots came into my head, and I almost could have laughed. 

Still pinning me down with one firm hand, he gradually lowered his other, trembling just a little with his fingers gently stroking down my shirt and tracing the way to where it was loosely tucked in. Landing on the belt. Unbuckling it. Tugging its end softly up to slide out through the loops of my trousers and uncoil around my waist in a hissing, snaking caress. His breathing was getting faster and faster. A glance at his face only told me he might scream or laugh or cry at any moment. My eyes came down in horror and I realised I was staring at his belt too. 

The firm hand off my shoulder then, he began using both to grip my belt and snap it to, pulling it tight between his gripping fists. Watching his own fingers tense and flex as he pulled tighter, tighter, tighter. Lowering it carefully around my neck. 

“The buckle’s grey,” I managed to say, and the dripping onto my forehead could have been tears or sweat or drool because my eyes by then had screwed themselves shut as the noose of the belt squeezed ever tighter. “It isn’t black, it – isn’t – black-” 

As if by divine intervention, at some point my unconscious flailing grasps must have got a grip on his black belt buckle and pulled hard enough to crack it loose. He stopped immediately after that. When the spots had faded from my eyes sufficient to permit my sight he was seated back on the couch, doubled over and fiddling to get his belt done up again, frowning and pouting like a small child over difficult homework. He didn’t seem to notice as I staggered past and out the room, the grey-buckled belt still hung around my neck, and I began to hear my own voice choking and sputtering at Shelly to call the fucking police. 

That was the last time I ever saw him. I keep in touch with his doctor at the hospital, and they say he’s doing well, all things considered. They still haven’t been able to get him to undress at all no matter how they drug him, which, as he’s not been allowed to go home yet, means his hygiene has taken a turn. He keeps telling them it’s fine. He never fixed his belt buckle. I’m told the police keep a constant guard beside his bed, a kind of suicide watch, though I’m not sure how long that’s meant to last. I have a suspicion that as time goes on, Black Belt may feel better and better.

I do keep having dreams where I find out he’s bought another one and hanged himself with it. Tried to take the future into his own hands, make it happen now, today. But none of us can do that. Of course, for my part I had to go through all the usual rituals with the higher-ups. People asking over and over and over if I’m traumatised. Having any trouble sleeping, eating, working, thinking. Poking, prodding. But I don’t feel any different. I’m just dressing a little darker, that’s all. I bought a new black pair of shoes the other day, but that was just to match the belt.