by Marco Vassi
“What if we were to reverse the roles?” Ed asked. “What if I were to ask you to lie down and get into your fantasies. What do you think you would come up with now?”
Lydia chewed her lower lip and stared down at the floor. All at once she felt like a blushing teenage girl. Once the barrier of her role as therapist had been let down, she realized that she was totally vulnerable to the actual feelings and needs that motivated her as a person. On the one hand, this gave her a sense of heightened reality; but on the other, she no longer had any firm ground to stand on. She wondered what therapy was anyway, this highly artificial situation in which one human being assumed a stance of superior wisdom in order to supposedly help another human being with problems which the first person might be harrowed with in his or her own life. Yet, without that distance, false as it might seem, people would not reach the point that she and Ed were at now.
“Therapy is like Wittgenstein’s ladder,” she concluded. “Once it’s been used to get one to the second floor, it can be thrown away. Therapy is a tool, no more, no less.”
She looked up at Ed, and saw that he was leering. He had taken her yielding silence for acquiescence and was now relishing fucking her. Or, from the look in his eye, raping her. A flurry of perception flipped through her, and she saw the situation from a score of viewpoints at once, including the scenario in which she emerged as an object of degradation, preying on people’s vulnerabilities to slake her ever-growing lust, like a vampire with an insatiable hunger.
She thought she heard a rustling in one corner of the room, and she glanced over to see what it could be. A spasm of paralyzing horror gripped her as she saw the face of Doctor Monroe forming in the air, his ironic gaze taking in the entire scene.
She didn’t have too much opportunity to remain in that condition, however, for Ed was already coming toward her, his hands reaching for her breasts. Something in his manner, something in the way that what she had intended as a serious experiment in therapeutic relationship had degenerated into erotic tawdriness, disgusted her. But she could not move. The specter of Doctor Monroe held her in thrall, and her own lascivious vibration put her cunt in control over her mind.
Her thoughts vacillated between psychological rationalizations and the brute reality of her condition. She was alternately working on the edge of an erotic revolution, breaking down the walls between patient and doctor, and at the same time being nothing more than a randy woman who was using her therapist’s role to have people come to her office and pay for sex, either to masturbate in front of her, or as it seemed would happen now, to fuck her.
She struggled with the conflict, all the while listening to Doctor Monroe’s ghastly chuckle, while Ed pushed on relentlessly. She felt his hot breath against her cheek, his tongue in her ear, his fingers at her nipples. A certain loosening took place in her belly and her thighs parted slightly, giving him access to the rapidly secreting slit between them. She could already smell her own secretions beginning to fill the space.
His frantic hands slid down her stomach and one cupped her cunt while the other made its way behind, covering the crack of her ass. She was clutched tightly, and found herself squirming in his grasp, rotating her pelvis to rub more energetically against his palms. Then, he seemed to have ten arms. He was stroking her and prodding her and taking her clothes off and unzipping his pants all at once. They rolled around the floor, puffing and wrestling and humping like college students on a babysitter date.
Lydia was now practically naked, her blouse thrown to one side, her slacks down her legs and hanging on to one of her ankles, her panties literally torn down the middle and discarded. The lithe, lovely and intelligent therapist was writhing on her own rug and her patient of a few moments earlier was mauling her indiscriminately, his salivating tongue laying wet swatches on her breasts, his teeth nipping her nipples, his hands insinuating themselves into her cunt and asshole.
“Oh, you hot little bitch,” Ed moaned. “I knew it, I knew you were a slut. Under all the fancy talk, you’re just a hot cunt just like all the others.”
She both reveled in and was horrified by his words. They simultaneously inflamed and frightened her. For she was, in a sense, what he said she was. But at the same time her whole effort had been to help him with his feelings about women. With an inspiration born of desperation, she tried a dangerous stratagem.
“Just like Julie, eh? Is your little Julie like this? While you try to turn her into a virgin, is she somewhere right now with some man sticking his cock into her quivering quim?”
An insane rage flashed into his eyes, and he reared back and slapped her hard across the mouth. At once she tasted the metallic tang of blood. For an instant she feared he might go berserk and really hurt her, or even kill her, but instead he grabbed her hair and yanked her head forward, pressing her face against his crotch.
“Suck it, you therapy whore,” he said.
“Oh Lord,” Lydia thought. “It’s going to be another one of those.”
“I’m glad you explained it all to me, Lydia,” he said. “Now that I’m clear as to where the different aspects of my behavior come from, I can choose which level I want to work from. And right now, I’m digging all the horrid, icky neurotic shit in the middle layer. So put your cunt mouth on my hot prick.”
She felt the throbbing length of hard flesh push itself between her lips and slide along her tongue. Ed pumped his hips into her face and his cock lodged in her throat. But it was a temporary stay. She couldn’t breathe and the gag reflex set in. She started to vomit. He pulled out, gave her a second to catch her breath, and then shoved in again. Again, her stomach lurched as her throat constricted and convulsed. Ed was on his knees while Lydia lay on her belly. He held her face up by pulling her hair, and he fucked her face with hard, almost vicious strokes. He looked down with an expression of gloating delight. Here was his therapist, an educated and stunning woman, her mouth around his rod.
Something in Lydia snapped and she gave way to the erotic manifestations and movements which complemented the action she had been conscripted into. Her ass rotated as she pressed her pussy against the floor. It’s interesting that certain motions, abstracted from an erotic context, serve no purpose but to allow the body to free itself of certain inhibition tensions, and have come to be judged erotic in themselves.
“I’ve got a cock in my mouth, and I’m pumping away like a nymphomaniac trying to have an orgasm, but I swear this isn’t sexy,” Lydia said to herself.
Then her whole body was racked by spasms, and even as she felt herself beginning to throw up, the one thought that caught her was that Ed would be viewing this as a quintessentially erotic scene.
He pulled his cock out, and before he could thrust it in again, Lydia vomited, spewing up the contents of her stomach over Ed’s thighs.
“Son of a bitch, that’s wild,” Ed said as he ejaculated.
He came for a long time, still twitching after his seed was spent, and when the excitement passed away, he let Lydia drop. She fell as though unconscious and lay without moving. Ed looked down at her and shivered.
He rose slowly to his feet and backed away. He made his way to Lydia’s bathroom, cleaned himself as best he could, went back to get his shoes, and walked quickly, nervously out of the apartment.
Lydia lay in a yellow stupor until she was revived by the screams. They came from far away at first, and she didn’t connect them with herself. But as she focused, opened her eyes and looked around, she saw Marie Jorgenson, her next patient, standing in the doorway, terror carved into her features.
Lydia sat up slowly, shook her head, and then spoke, slowly and calmly. She was smeared with blood and sperm and vomit, her body naked, an expression of sparkling bemusement, a second-cousin to madness, lighting up her face.
“What’s wrong. Made,” she asked. “Haven’t you ever seen a fantasy come to life before?”
6
As the city sank deeply into the grey of winter, Lydia collapsed further into herself. More and more she stayed at home, leaving only rarely, having her food delivered, going from apartment area to office area and back without varying her routine a lot. She had never felt more alone, even though she was surrounded by people during much of her waking day. Fred was staying away, showing a faint and vague disapproval of her consciously chosen mood.
Doctor Monroe was dead. And there was no one else in the world to whom she could bring her doubts and insecurities. The incident with Ed had unnerved her, but she had nowhere to go but forward. Or was it downward? Once a person is embarked upon a course which is totally involving, taking in a sense of identity, as well as function, the whole of reality changes. Everything from one’s friendships to one’s relationship with the Absolute undergoes a subtle and terrible transformation. It is like going to a foreign country, and staying for longer than just a visit. Soon, one starts to absorb the language, the tempo, the nuance of the people. But all the while, back home, life is moving at its usual pace and the people there are sharing common experiences. Then, abruptly, one returns and finds that he had become an alien, a pleasantly welcomed but intrinsically distant stranger. The attitude of everyone one knows is something like, “Well, we’re glad to have you back, but don’t expect us to drop everything; we’ve been struggling with our lives while you’ve been traipsing off.” And then one realizes that one must stay in one’s own home for as long a period as one had been away in order to re-acclimate, and still, after all that, forever have missed that slice of contextual time, forever be just a little out of step.
So it was with Lydia. Her colleagues seemed removed, and she did not know whether reports of what she was doing were reaching them or not and affecting their feelings about her, or whether she was projecting her own unease onto them.
One afternoon she had run into Casper Gemini, a man with whom she had had shared one drunken night at an American Association of Humanistic Psychologists’ convention in Chicago when the two of them had absorbed almost a fifth of vodka and then gone swimming naked in the chill waters of Lake Michigan. Afterwards, when he had fucked her on a slab of rough concrete, she could not distinguish her tremors of passion from the shivers of cold that seized her body in a continual attack. The following morning she awoke in pain and ran to the mirror to gaze in astonishment at her back which was a plain of scratches and cuts and abrasions. The skin from her buttocks to her shoulders did not have a single square inch which had not been cut or ripped or rubbed raw.
Since then they had run into one another at parties, meetings, and on the street, and shared the chummy camaraderie of people who have been through a war together. But at their last encounter, there had been something strained about his attitude. When she smiled at him, he returned her greeting with a small scowl before putting his face back into its mask of usual neutrality. From then on, as they sat and had coffee in the Oak Room of the Plaza, he had appeared friendly enough, but she was convinced his manner was forced. And when she tried to swing the conversation over to some of the latest developments in her work, he had actually turned his eyes away and stared over her shoulder.
“I said, I’m beginning to explore some interesting aspects of fantasy,” she repeated, compelling him to pay attention.
“The way the world is today, reality is unreal enough without trying to get fantastic about it,” he replied, still not looking at her.
Lydia felt a chill of apprehension course down her spine. She leaned back in her chair, sipped at her coffee, and lit a cigarette, all the while studying Casper’s face. He had the air of a friend who had to tell you something unpleasant and wishes you would go away so someone else could give you the news. Finally, the tension between them became like that between two lovers on the telephone, when he is in a distant city and she is lying in bed being fucked by another man. He suspects the truth of the situation and she is balancing herself between guilt and self-assertiveness, and both are talking about oblique trivia. Lydia stubbed out her cigarette and blurted out, “What the fuck’s going on, Casper?”
Still without meeting her eyes he said, in a rapid monotone, “Look, Lydia, I like you, and what you do with your patients is your business. I’ll just tell you that Ed Morrison went to see Harry and told him the whole story of your little trip together.”
Harry was Harry Saunders, a man who, despite the fact that his peers considered him a trifle absurd, carried enormous prestige in the therapeutic community.
“Harry has muttered something about having you brought before the Licensing Board,” Casper went on. “I personally don’t think it will come to that, especially if you lay low for a while. Which might not be a bit of bad advice.”
“I’m sure that’s precisely the advice the medical community of his day gave to Freud,” Lydia replied, her voice trimmed to elegant tautness with irony.
“Maybe you’re right, and maybe the price experimenters have to pay is running the risk of having their careers ruined. And if you believe in what you’re doing strongly enough, then my blessings on you. It just all sounds like you’re into a strong regressive cycle and aren’t doing anything more creative than playing with shit, your own and other people’s.”
“Maybe it’s only that,” she told him. “But how am I supposed to find out if I can’t even talk about it to any of my colleagues, even those who are supposed to be friends?” The accusation in her words did not go unheeded and the man looked away in embarrassment
“I’m sorry,” he said at last, “but not me. I have a large mortgage and an unproductive wife to support, not to mention three leeches who are passing themselves off as human beings claiming to be my children.”
Lydia looked at him with disbelief. Almost fifty, running to fat, his hair thinning, his glasses slipping down his nose, the play of fear in his eyes, he gave all the appearance of a cornered rat.
“And this is a man who is supposed to be dedicated to helping humanity,” she thought.
Casper intercepted her glance. “I know what you’re thinking,” he told her. “But consider the other side. You are into something very, very dangerous. The idea of using fantasy is, of course, as old as the Greeks. But the point is to allow the fantasies to illuminate, not to direct or control the reality. You seem to be urging your patients, if what Ed says is not too grossly exaggerated, to act their daydreams out, and even joining in yourself. Now, you’ve already got one suicide, and the suspicious circumstances surrounding old Monroe’s death . . . “
Lydia’s eyebrows shot up.
“Oh, there have been rumors. The word is that you and Monroe were fucking when he had his heart attack.” He lowered his voice. “Frazier has a friend who is a drinking buddy of the Coroner’s, and he told him that Monroe had dried vaginal secretions around the base of his cock.”
Casper leaned forward and took Lydia’s hands in his. “I know, it’s all very hypothetical and rumorish, but little by little a noose is being slipped over your head. Now, with this Morrison incident making the rounds, a lot of people think that maybe you’ve flipped, or . . . “ he lowered his voice, “that you’ve been cursed and are carrying some kind of jinx.”
“And the response to all that is for everyone to turn their backs on me?” Lydia said, almost shouting.
“There’s potentially big trouble in all this,” Casper told her. “Lawsuits, loss of license, criminal charges. Anyone who gets too closely associated with you will get splashed with blood if you ever come under the axe. And please don’t think of it in terms of cowardice. Because I would fight if it were something that I believed in. But why should I risk my career for some idea of yours, something that may not be more than an acting out of your residual neurotic structure? I mean, you may be heading for the edge of a cliff. So why should anyone follow you?”
“How about preventing me, if that’s what’s really happening?”
“Well, you
know you can make an appointment with me anytime, Lydia,” Casper said, using a tone on her that she had used countless times with others. In an instant she saw through the infuriating smugness of the therapeutic guise, and she felt retroactively ashamed for all the people she had treated with such professionally polished and camouflaged disdain.
In a startling moment, the entire therapeutic community appeared like a cloud over Casper’s head. She saw thousands upon thousands of timid people, lost in books and theories and techniques, hiding from the brute reality of life. Refusing to consider any phenomenon which didn’t fit their neat little models, discounting everything from diet to politics to celestial influence. Oh, a few had been able to broaden their horizons a bit, but even at that they remained pitifully limited. She suddenly realized that if one took a therapist to the fullest development of his or her powers, one would finally emerge with nothing more esoteric than a simple intelligent human being.
“Therapists are professional retards,” she thought, “using other people as stepping stones in their own development or, worse, as rungs in a ladder for their scramble to the top of their self-aggrandizement. And it’s probably true that a whore has more honesty than anyone with initials after their name.”
Since that afternoon with Casper, she had become more and more of a recluse, sinking into her work and thoughts and researches, worrying from time to time because she was becoming someone she didn’t fully recognize, but also finding herself gradually suffused with a new sense of strength, the kind of confidence which arises when one has the liberty to do what one pleases within the context of what one believes to be right. It was as though Doctor Monroe, and all the tradition he represented, had become a surrogate parent, a sort of giant amorphous superego which had gradually suffocated her, to the point where she had been afraid to live according to the dictates of her own conscience. Now, she reminded herself daily that she was not doing anything but attempting to learn, and she had warned all her patients that she was as much in the dark as they. She might make mistakes, but that was part of understanding.