Saving the World by Gary Ponzo

“It’s your specialty, teenagers. Why not?”
    “But did she ever tell you who referred her to me?”
    Sullivan didn’t seem to understand and Bryant knew his line of questioning was only making his friend more suspicious of his own state of mind.
    “Okay, forget it,” Bryant said. “Tell me about the invisible aliens.”
    Sullivan swiveled his sleek monitor around for Bryant to see. He pecked on his keyboard.
    “What are you doing?” Bryant asked.
    “I’m pulling up her file,” Sullivan said, a little gruff.
    A couple of clicks and Margo Sutter’s chart came to life on the screen. Sullivan opened the file to his first session with Margo. Bryant dove in, reading the text with intense interest.
    “See here,” Sullivan pointed to the middle of the screen. “She first came to me complaining of hearing voices in her head. Naturally I considered auditory hallucinations, until she picked up on some astonishing thoughts from a patient in my waiting room. It was someone who was pregnant and debating whether to have the baby. This patient hadn’t even told her own mother, yet Margo had known every detail, right down to where the baby was conceived. Of course I didn’t discover this until after Margo left and I’d listened to the girl’s account. That’s when I questioned my diagnosis of psychosis, until . . .”
    Sullivan clicked to the next page and said, “This session is where the alien voices made their debut. Notice the dialogue. There are two different voices. One told her to get medication so she couldn’t hear them, the other pleaded for her help. He told her she was the only one who could help—that’s why she survived.”
    “Survived?”
    Sullivan looked at Bryant. “You really don’t know this story, do you?”
    Bryant shook his head.
    “You didn’t read the piece in Time?”
    “I glanced through it.”
    Sullivan moved away from the computer. “You really are retreating from society, aren’t you?”
    “Exactly,” Bryant snapped. “That’s why I’m sitting in your office on a Friday night asking you about a young woman who needs help.”
    Sullivan pursed his lips, but said nothing. It seemed Sullivan wanted Bryant to cool down before he went any further.
    Bryant held up his hands. “Okay, already. Tell me.”
    Sullivan returned to the keyboard and tapped a few times. “They were on vacation in Alaska when their plane crashed. It took Margo’s entire family,” Sullivan said. He pulled up an article from a news website and scanned the piece. “They blamed it on a computer failure. The pilot lost his instruments during a heavy snowstorm and ran into the side of Mt. McKinley.”
    Bryant’s stomach clenched at the notion. Then something occurred to him. “Margo was on board?”
    “It was a miracle,” Sullivan said, still viewing the article.
    All Bryant could think about was the psychological trauma. Margo must’ve been in shock for weeks. She was too young to take on so much pain. Too tender to develop scar tissue that large. No wonder there was a war going on in her mind. Margo was a walking miracle, and it had nothing to do with her physical ordeal.
    Bryant said. “Let me see her file again.”
    Sullivan tapped the keyboard, then slid the mouse toward him. Bryant clicked through several other sessions with Margo, and with each one, he found Sullivan’s direction to be stellar. He asked precisely the type of questions Bryant would’ve asked, and his notations following the sessions were founded in sound psychoanalytical theories. Margo’s issues became more and more systemic, slowly creating her own fantasy world in order to find relief for her guilt.
    “Notice anything missing from the session?” Sullivan asked.
    Bryant scrolled down and went from page to page, looking for it. Searching for the one thing every lone survivor asks. When he was finished with the transcript of the entire session, he looked up at Sullivan.
    “She never wonders why she was the only one,”