Circe (17 page)

“That’s the most fucked-up story I’ve ever heard.”

“Even more so when it’s your story,” I added dryly.

“You aren’t really gonna go on this trip with her this weekend.”

“I have two weeks left with this woman and I want stellar reviews. I’m going to the conference because she told me to.”

Jeremy shook his head. “You couldn’t leave a piece of pussy alone if it was on fire.”

“Has Brooke left you?” I asked in a desperate attempt to change topics of conversation.

“She ain’t been here in five days now. She didn’t tell me when she left. I didn’t ask. She didn’t take all of her stuff so I don’t know.”

“Are you okay?”

“Do you care?”

“Yeah. Of course. I know I can be an ass sometimes, but I still care. You know, I may not call you, but you don’t call me either.”

“I know.”

It was late when I crawled into bed with Pria and I was a little drunk. The apartment was cold and Pria was shivering under the covers. She pulled herself close to me and muttered something under her breath. I wanted to tell her everything. I needed her to know, but fear overwhelmed me. The weekend passed with muted happiness. How could I tell her? How could I break her heart?

* * * *

Roy from the third floor snuck a note to me through a mental health worker that Monday. I was a little dismayed and didn’t quite know how to react. The note didn’t say much and he wasn’t my patient, so I wasn’t sure what the procedures were. I talked to Cassie about it and she indicated that their therapeutic relationship had suffered some difficulties. She very nonchalantly told me I could take over visiting him a couple times a week if I wanted to. She threw his chart at me and walked away.

I hadn’t spent much time on the third floor and wasn’t used to the network of security procedures, but once I got through them the environment was a little more relaxed. Roy was out of his room, sitting on a chair in front of the window. He was fairly well groomed and presented himself as oriented to his environment.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” Roy said. He stood up to greet me and shook my hand. “Can we go to my room to talk? It’s a little more private.”

“Of course.” I followed him back to his room and sat down. “So, what’s going on?”

“I know I’m crazy and I know what I say doesn’t mean anything, but I can’t take this anymore and I just have to talk to someone so if you want to blow it off, or whatever, that’s fine, but I’m tellin’ you that I may be crazy but that doesn’t mean what I’m sayin’ isn’t true.” He spoke the entire sentence without taking a breath.

“Okay. So what are you saying?”

“You know why I’m here?” He was agitated. Nervous. He began to bite his nails.

“Yes. Do you?”

“Of course! But what I never told anyone but Dr. Allen was that I didn’t really kill them. Ok. I know, I killed them, but I didn’t kill my family. I hated my mom and dad sometimes, you know? They were really Christian and didactic and I had to go to mass like every other day and prayer groups and I could never go out. I hated that and I wanted to get back at them so I started hangin’ out with this bunch of guys who were into Wicca. You know witchcraft?”

“You were rebelling against what they believed in?”

“Shit yes. I started doing spells in my bedroom. Tryin’ to summon spirits and demons. Nothing ever happened. I tried to cast this one spell so I could go out to this bar and listen to a band. That was a complete crash and burn.”

“How were you doing otherwise? Were you depressed, anxious, having any peer problems?”

“Shut up. Just listen. None of that matters. Nothing worked until that morning. My mom had just went to drop my sister off at ballet and my dad and my other three sisters were upstairs listening to Christian rock or whatever stupid shit they did, when he came to me. Clear as day he just popped up in my summoning circle. It was like space ripped. The air tore and he just climbed out of the hole. He was the strangest thing, more like an animal than what I thought the devil would be. He was like a cat or a snake or if a cat and snake mated this is what their baby would look like. It said its name was Caal. The thing didn’t say anything else and the only thing I remember after that is waking in that fuckin’ jail cell.

"Don’t you see? I didn’t kill them. I loved those fuckin’ girls. I hated them, but I loved them. The worst I wanted to do to my parents was maybe steal some of their shit and pawn it for weed or fuck my girlfriend on the dining room table before the priest came over for dinner.”

“You never had any hallucinations or fugue states before this?” I asked.

“Can you just stop being a fuckin’ shrink for five minutes and listen? I never told any of you assholes this before because I knew that I would sound crazy. I’m not stupid. I just said what my lawyer told me to say. I didn’t fake any of the emotions though, you know, I acted crazy because, how can I live with myself now. I tried to kill myself three times. I’ve given up now. Maybe I could forget killing my parents, but they said I hit my two-year-old sister three times in the head with the back of an axe. I see that every night. Every night I see her crying. She’ll never be the same. She can’t talk right.” He began to cry.

It was several minutes before he could talk again. I leaned over and put my hand on his shoulder. His entire body heaved with the depth of emotion that was pouring out of him. The bed shuddered under the enormity of his sobs.

He wiped his eyes and nose on the back of his sleeve and looked up at me. “I never told anyone this. Who the hell was I going to tell? But she knew. She even knew his name.”

“Who?”

”Dr. Allen.”

“Whose name did she know?”

“For a fucking shrink you don’t listen worth a damn! Caal. She knew Caal!”

“Is this why you don’t want to see her anymore?”

“He left me alone. He got what he wanted, but now I see him all the time. He sits right where you’re sitting and stares at me all night. She brought him back. She listened to all the details about everything I did and she brought him back. She wants to kill me.”

“Why do you think she wants to kill you?”

“She brought him back to kill me!”

“This isn’t real. You’re projecting your delusions onto her. Why would she want to kill you? She’s your therapist. She wants to help you.”

“Yeah. That’s why she took me to her fucked-up temple in the basement and fucked me on the floor.”

“What?”

“She took me to the basement and we had sex on the floor.”

“Look. I think I should bring her up here and we should all talk about this together. The allegations you’re making are very serious. I’m not comfortable talking about them with you without her here to defend herself.”

“Of course she’ll say it never happened.”

“Is it possible that you’ve been having fantasies about Dr. Allen and you’ve projected her into your delusions? You seem very intelligent. You know what’s going on despite your illness. What do you think is more likely: that you were possessed by the devil and forced to kill your family and that your therapist has now summoned the devil to kill you, or that you have a disease that is making you think these things and see things that aren’t real and that you’re fixated on Dr. Allen and have pulled her into your disease?”

“Fuck you. I thought you might help. But you’re just bullshit!”

“I want to help. I really do. Let’s assume that everything you’re saying is true. What can I do? What can I do that is realistically within my power?”

“Just come up and see me. Don’t leave me alone with her. Please! Just don’t leave me alone with her.”

“I can do that. Is there anything else I can do?”

“No. But there is something you should know.”

“What?”

“This place is wrong. There is something wrong with it. Not like ghost story haunted, but something deeper. There are ghosts here, everyplace. One talks to me. One is nice. Her name is Jane. She told me to tell you to send your wife away.”

“What!?” I asked in violent desperation.

“I don’t know. That’s just what she said.”

“Look, I’ll help you, but if you ever mention my wife again, that’s it. I won’t ever see you again. Do you understand?”

“Sorry, man. Sorry.”

I stopped by his psychiatrist’s office on my way out and talked to him about Roy’s medication. I told him I would be taking over Roy’s treatment, so I was invited to his treatment team meetings on Mondays. His doctor said he would up his medication and make sure they kept a close eye on him. That was all I could do. I penciled him into my schedule for biweekly visits and tried to ignore the content of everything he said.

I couldn’t forget what he said, however. The coincidence was too much. I had never been afraid in my life. I had rock climbed and almost died. I had backpacked alone in the most remote deserts. I had faced everything I thought there was to fear in life without so much as a tremor, but as I sat there writing my report my skin crawled with some unknown emotion I could only describe as fear. I wasn’t sure what I was afraid of. I couldn’t imagine being afraid of Cassie and I couldn’t convince myself to believe Roy’s hallucinations—or my own, for that matter. Maybe I feared Circe herself, her long shadows and cold walls. The endless wailing from the unseen corners of her broken heart.

I sat in Cassie’s cluttered office, surrounded by her endless book shelves, and tried to convince myself that I was just having some kind of anxiety attack because of all the pressure on me. This wasn’t real. A beetle crawled across the desk. I carefully picked it up and opened the window, releasing it.

I looked out at the white chipped walls of the original fort. Bathed in the daylight, it seemed benevolent. It looked like a historical site where you might spend an afternoon with your family. From a distance, the patients who clustered around the cantina seemed like happy tourists discussing their daily adventures. I shook my head and told myself that being surrounded by so much madness was wearing me down. It was normal for male patients to have delusions about their female therapists. It had nothing to do with what happened between Cassie and me. I couldn’t believe Cassie would be corrupt enough to seduce a patient.

 A cool breeze passed through the office, forcing me to close the window, but I stood there for a while watching the wind blow. The tower gazed out at the hospital from its omnipotent elevation.

“Do you want to see what’s up there?” Cassie asked. I jumped. I hadn’t heard her walk in.

“No. I’ve had plenty of your tours. Thanks though.” My tone was dry.

“You’re missing out. That’s the oldest place here. It was the first thing built in Fort Laconsay. They dug into the earth and it fell. The tower fell four times before they were able to raise it.”

“I don’t really care,” I answered.

“What did Roy say?” she asked in an almost professional tone.

“He thinks you’re trying to kill him.”

“He’s been telling everyone that.”

“Did you have sex with him?”

She laughed loudly. “I’m sorry?”

“He said you took him to a place that sounded a lot like where you took me and had sex with him.”

“I’m sorry? Look, I need to clarify things. I don’t have relationships with my patients. I’m a psychologist. I’m a professional. I know you find my personal beliefs offensive, but that does not mean I’m unethical. This isn’t the middle ages. You should know that witches aren’t a brood of women trying to ensnare men into their satanic orgies. I think that was just some man’s fantasy in the first place. I’m assuming that this has to do with what happened between us, right? You wouldn’t believe these accusations if we hadn’t fucked? Half the women here claim to have had sex with you or at least say they very much want to and I don’t confront you. So let’s be blunt and get it out in the open. I find you very attractive. I have since you first came in here. I had no intentions of fucking you, but you made it so easy and to tell you the truth I’m a little kinky, but it goes no further than that. It can stop here. At the time we were together, I thought you wanted me as much as I wanted you. I know as well as you that this affair has been completely inappropriate, but I thought there was some kind of fire between us, something mutual that deserved to be explored.” She smiled wickedly and kissed my neck. “If this isn’t what you want all you have to do is say so. I may have misread you.”

She seemed younger in that light. When I had first seen her, I had thought she was so old. But she looked like a woman in her prime, beautiful, wild, and irreverent. I put my hand on her shoulder. “I apologize. All that voodoo shit just got under my skin a little. You know that I find it archaic and absurd.” I laughed, trying to mask my fear and discomfort. I could see her breathing, waiting for me to say something else. My feelings for her were as fickle as a child’s. I didn’t know what to say or do. I hesitated, drawing several long breaths. Finally I spoke. “I can’t have an affair with you. My wife is pregnant and I don’t want to be the kind of father my father was. I respect you, but all of this has to stop.”

“I can’t say I’m not disappointed. It’s good timing, in any case; you’ll be leaving next week and I’ll get those two other worthless shits to try to shape into something resembling real psychologists.”

“I never got the impression that you cared about your interns' training. Are you really going to do anything resembling shaping?”

She laughed again. “Oh please, you of all people should know that I’m constantly shaping and teaching. Look what I’ve done to you. I’ve eroded your confidence and forced you to evaluate yourself.”

“You give yourself too much credit. You’re not the first woman I’ve fucked since I’ve been married. It was my wife and my baby that have changed me, and maybe this place. You’ve been an anal retentive Hun of a supervisor and a let down as a lover.”

“Well, we still have a week left, maybe I can make an impression at the conference, or over the last week? Do you have your bags packed?”

They weren’t. I spent the rest of that week avoiding contact with her as much as possible. I tried to get home early and take care of Pria. I started cooking dinner and even cleaned the bathroom.