Free Autopsy of an Eldritch City: Ten Tales of Strange and Unproductive Thinking by James Champagne

Tokyo store has no floor buttons. In my case it was so chronic that, when I was growing up, I would refuse to wear any type of clothing that had buttons on them. Just the act of touching a button would leave me feeling physically ill. Of course, with some people the phobia is so severe that the sight of a button is enough to induce vomiting.”
    The date was September 14th, 2013: a Monday. I was seated in the office of my therapist, Dr. Roxy, who I had been a patient of for around 5-6 months. Her office was situated towards the back of a medium-sized three-story office building in downtown Thundermist known as the Plaza Center. This building was quite modern looking, and on its façade there was a giant angular piece of diamond-like glass that served as the entrance to the building’s atrium: it looked like something that might have fallen off the dress of Lady Gaga if Lady Gaga had been 500 feet tall (incidentally, I think the idea of a 500-foot-tall Lady Gaga is one of the most awesome ideas ever). Dr. Roxy’s office was a small room, which contained a desk and computer and a framed picture of some black girl, a bookshelf where one could find standard titles by Freud and Jung (along with books on hypnotism and post-hypnotic command techniques), a few comfortable chairs with plush cushions and wooden frames, and a file cabinet or two. The walls were decorated with wallpaper that sported a “fluffy white clouds floating through a blue sky” design, and hanging up on these walls were two framed posters, one of which depicted a photograph of the planet Earth as seen from outer space, while the other was an Ansel Adams print, a photograph of Redwood Forest, Founder’s Grove, with the words “FIAT LUX” at the bottom of it. On the wall facing the chairs where the patients sat there were large windows (made of tinted glass) that stretched from the floor to the ceiling. They gave one not only a good view of Broderbund Street, but also the massive structure known as St. Durtal’s Church, which was located next door, behind Plaza Center. Sometimes during my sessions with Dr. Roxy I would find myself getting distracted by the enormous church: a friend of mine, a librarian named Timothy, was obsessed with the world-famous frescoes that could be found within the church’s walls, and he was always bugging me to visit it with him on Sundays, when tours were held there.
    Prior to my appointment with Dr. Roxy, I had been seated in the waiting room of her office, deep in the heart of Plaza Center, flipping through a magazine, this really old back issue of Life & Style Weekly that had first been published all the way back on January 3, 2011. The cover story dealt with Heidi Montag’s plastic surgery disasters, and it promised world exclusive shocking photos of “Horrific Scars,” “Botched Implants,” “Lumpy Liposuction,” and “Mangled Ears.” Bored, I flipped to the story, which began on page 24 and consisted of 6 pages, mostly photographs analyzing Montag’s plastic surgery flaws in such a detailed, almost fetishistic way that I had to remind myself that it couldn’t have been written by J.G. Ballard, who had died on April 19, 2009. The best page was page 26, which consisted of a full-page photograph of Heidi Montag, clad in only a white Land’s End bikini and top, her hands on her hips. At the top left-hand corner of the page were the words “THE REAL SIDE OF SURGERY” in bold capital letters, and on this page there were a number of lines pointing out where all the plastic surgery flaws could be found on Heidi’s body, including a “horrifying jagged line” behind her ears (“They basically cut off your ears and sew them back on”), the two “caterpillar-size bald spots” along her scalp, a 2-inch-long raised blemish on her chin, a nose that has been operated on twice and was apparently so fragile she was afraid it would break off, lumpy legs, the fluid-filled scar beneath her butt cheek, excessive scar