Circe

by Jessica Penot

  After all of this, we were overjoyed when the fat nurse came in and gave us a test on the material we had seen and told us we could soon leave. We were tested on hand washing procedures and sterile needle techniques. I could barely even remember which video had these facts, but I faked the knowledge well and passed the test.

  At 4:30, two psychologists came to greet us in the lobby of the building. Dr. Donalds was an old man with a thick, gray beard. His accent was deep and quirky. He smiled at me as he took Andy and John away with him. I waved as they walked back towards the acute ward.

  "I'll see ya in six months, Dr. Black," Dr. Donalds said as they disappeared in the fog.

  It was only after they had left that Dr. Cassandra Allen rose to meet me. Cassie. She seemed abhorrent to me on that first day. Her smile was flaccid and unconvincing. Her eyes revealed neither warmth nor disdain. They were distant and completely disinterested in me.

  It’s strange how the most remarkable transitions in someone's life can be marked with little more than a muffled gasp. She made no impression. Her long flaxen, blonde hair was tied back in a messy braid that rested on her shoulder. Her ashen, blue eyes stared out blankly from behind her heavy, black glasses. Her flesh was so pale I could almost make out the blood vessels that passed beneath it. She wore nothing striking. Nothing that would emphasize any beauty she might have hidden underneath her flat exterior. Beneath her clothes, I could perceive her Ethiopian thinness, but I could imagine little more than white skin stretched over bone.

  I drew back from her instinctively. "I’m Dr. Allen," she said.

  "I’m Eric Black," I responded.

  "I go home at 4:30," she said, as if I would know what she meant.

  I looked at her for a few minutes, before she finally said, "It is 4:45 right now. This is the last time I will stay late for you. I may ask you to stay late, but I will never stay past 4:30."

  "I'm sure you work hard and need your time off," I responded limply.

  She looked me up and down. I felt like a frog pinned down to a dissection plate. The scent of formaldehyde seemed to fill my nostrils. "Follow me," she muttered. She walked in the opposite direction of the acute ward to an empty field. Robertson looked exactly like the acute ward. It was a mirror image of the other building. But it was alone and isolated in its empty field.

  Dr. Allen led me through several corridors unlocking and locking doors as she went. She unlocked the elevator and took me to the fourth floor and through the patient wing to a long double-locked hall that contained nothing but offices. Her office was large, dark, and dusty.

  "On the acute ward, most of the psychologists have to share their offices with two other psychologists, but here I have the place all to myself. I only have to share it with you."

  Her walls were lined with enormous cluttered bookshelves. The books were stacked up messily and in no apparent order. They were thick with dust. They were old. Older than the building they were housed in. She had books on phrenology and old papers by Jung and Freud. There was even an assortment of books on ancient mythology and magic.

  She did not have her diplomas on her wall. Only a framed picture of a bare-breasted woman holding a human heart. The style looked art deco.

  "It's Edmund Dulac," she said.

  "What?"

  "The painting. She’s Circe."

  "Who?"

  "The woman in the painting."

  She wasn’t how I imagined Circe. She was young. Almost girlish and dark skinned. She was beautiful.

  Dr. Allen leaned over and gave me a ring with several keys on it. "This one opens the gate to the parking lot. This one opens the front door. This one is to the corridor doors. This one is to the elevator and this one is to my office. That table there is for your things. We’ll share a computer. You may only receive emergency calls here. No personal calls. We take lunch at 11:00 am. I expect you here at 7:00 am. Any questions?"

  "I think you've made everything as clear as rain."

  "Is rain clear?"

  "I believe so."

  She walked me to the parking lot silently. She didn’t say a single word to me. Not even a goodbye as we walked to our cars. The others were waiting for me when I arrived. They chatted eagerly about everything they were going to be doing over the next six months. I couldn’t help feeling as if I had made the wrong choice in volunteering to work the chronic ward first.

  CHAPTER 3

  I am the plumed serpent, the beast with fangs of fire.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thurisaz – Gateway

  I’m not a dreamer. In any sense of the word. I have never wasted my time dreaming about possible futures or worlds that could never be. I don’t enjoy reading fiction. I have always grounded myself in the now. I plan for the future and focus on the task at hand. I have never wasted time with dreams.

  My sleep wasn’t cluttered by dreams, either. If I had dreamt, I didn’t ever remember dreaming. I would close my eyes and fall into a peaceful, murky oasis. This place was thoughtless and motionless. It was true rest. It was deep sleep. This is why that first night stood out in the landscape of my nights. I dreamt. I dreamt in Technicolor. Finally I understood why so many of my clients had come to me asking for the key to the messages imbedded in their dreams. I had always believed that dreams held no deep meaning. They don’t tap into some Freudian subconscious world of bizarre symbols, or portend future events. Dreams are the frontal cortex's way of interpreting the random neurological firing that takes place at night. Thus, if your visual cortex is stimulated while you sleep, you dream in vibrant colors. Old memories are touched and the things that cause you greatest anxiety or thought are always the first things to come out in a dream. They aren’t symbolic or hard to interpret. They’re easy and often random.

  My dream wasn’t so easily decoded and when I woke up at 2:00 a.m. sweating next to my wife, I felt empty and disturbed. I got out of bed and wandered the house. I drank water. I looked out the window. But the dream lingered and I couldn’t sleep. I had dreamt of a woman. At least I thought she was a woman. Her flesh was diaphanous, with black vessels that pulsed beneath her skin. Her features were human, but she wasn’t. Insects crawled out of her open mouth and crawled back in through her nose, and spiders writhed just beneath the surface of her glassy flesh. She was in constant labor, and in an endless cycle she delivered deplorable screaming wolves into the world, only to have them climb back up her naked belly and tear back into her womb in some demented testament to Faustian sin. Tentacles ripped out through the flesh on her head creating something that resembled hair. The tentacles slithered down over her naked body, perpetually moving. Despite the motion of all of her parts, she was disturbingly still, like a statue crawling with serpents. She stood, quietly watching me. She did not speak or move. She just stood and watched. She seemed like a tomb, writhing with decrepit life but unable to be anything but a receptacle for that life.

  When I awoke, I could still smell her. I found the remnants of the dream inescapable. Her image was burned in my brain and no amount of pacing or reading or thought-stopping could remove the impact of the dream. Finally, Pria got up and found me sitting on the sofa.

  "What are you doing up?" she said. Her eyes were still heavy with sleep and her voice reached out to me from her own dreams.

  "I can't sleep," I said.

  "That's not like you." Concern brought her out of her sleep.

  "I know. That bothers me more than anything else."

  "You aren't nervous about the new job, are you?” Her voice took a teasing tone.

  "I don't think so."

  She put her arms around me. "Then what is it, Doctor?"

  "I dreamt."

  She laughed. "You're kidding? I thought dreams were a sign of serotonin disregulation and inadequate amounts of stage four sleep?"

  "I hate it when you use my words to get back at me." I felt better already. Her gentle teasing and hard kissing made the dark woman fade away.

  "For a psychologist you completely
lack insight," she said.

  "You know what they say: only crazy people go into psychology."

  "I know it's true with you. Come back to bed. I'll give you a massage."

  "I can't say no to that."

  We were like children together. We played. We teased. We made love. We were physical and when I was with her, everything else seemed to fade away. It didn't matter if I slept that night. When the sun peeked in through the window, I felt rested and alive. She gave me that.

  She didn't get up with me when I left for work. She lay, completely naked, on her belly with no covers. Her hair framed her head and she breathed deeply, peacefully. I could have sat forever looking at her. Listening to her breath.

  I always ran in the mornings. I would get up early and run at least three miles. I liked to take my time getting ready. I spent as much time as I could in the shower and eating breakfast. I stretched and did sit-ups after my run, if I had enough time. I was a morning person. Pria wasn’t. She’d lie in bed until ten minutes before she had to get up. She’d take a five-minute shower and eat a banana on the way out the door. She always planned the details the night before. She’d lay out her outfit and paint her nails. She exercised at night, even though she knew it was less effective.

  She’d banter on about how the metabolism worked more efficiently if you ran in the morning and then she’d put off her aerobics until 10:30 pm. She’d sit stubbornly in front of the TV and turn on Taebo at the last minute, all the while complaining bitterly about how her schedule made it impossible for her to exercise at any other time. I never commented on this. Both she and I knew it made no sense. She’d get home at 6:00, eat a Lean Cuisine and watch TV. She’d paint her nails and email her friends. She’d call her mother. She wasted time doing everything but exercise, but the ritual was one of the things I adored about her. I would sit with a beer in my lap and watch her do her stretches.

  She had four workout videos. My favorite was always the yoga. She’d put on her gray spandex pants and twist her body into positions that made me sit back happily and imagine her naked. It was better than TV. I loved listening to her pant. I loved the way she’d look at me and ask me why I sat and stared at her. I thought it was obvious. Aerobics were foreplay to me.

  I hated it when she skipped a workout.

  I thought about her doing yoga as I sat and waited for Andy and John to pick me up for work. They were late and if I didn't try to focus on something else I would have gone crazy. I was thankful that the next day I would drive.

  By the time they did pull up in Andy's beat up orange Volkswagen, I had begun to have elaborate fantasies about murdering Andy in her sleep.

  "Sorry. I had some car problems," Andy said as she moved the old McDonald's wrappers off the back seat for me.

  "If you have car trouble again," I responded, "call me and I’ll come and pick everyone up. I don't mind driving, but I can't be late. Dr. Allen seems like a bit of a hard ass."

  Andy muttered something under her breath and John laughed. "What was that?"

  "Just commenting on what a piece of shit this car is," she responded.

  I sat quietly in the back seat and tried to tune Andy and John's conversation out. It was already clear at this point that I wasn’t going to be part of their tight line of friendship. This didn’t bother me. I hadn’t wanted to work with them to begin with. What did bother me was their incessant whispering. Their laughter was like sandpaper on my bare ass. In graduate school there had been a girl much like Andy. She was young. Younger than the rest of the graduate students, and like Andy she had been heavy set and slovenly. She wore shorts to class and showed her tattoos without shame. I hated people who didn’t respect their appearance. She and I had not gotten along. We had been forced to work on a project together for our research fellowship. I had gotten her removed from the project. Pria had criticized me harshly for this. She had wagged her red tipped finger at me and told me that I had ruined a girl's career for my own spite and prejudice. I knew she had done nothing wrong, but I had used her own personality faults to make it look like she had.

  Pria had never understood, and she wouldn’t understand Andy either. These women were trying to hurt me through more subtle means. I could see that girl talking about me behind my back. I could tell that she had been working to make herself look better than me in the faculty's eyes. I could never tell Pria this, it would sound like paranoid delusion, but it wasn’t. Any more than it was paranoid delusion to think that Andy was sitting in the front seat whispering about me to John.

  People always wanted to hurt me or reduce me to less than I was because they knew I was the best. I have always been the best student and the best psychologist and this breeds hatred and resentment. I worked hard to be perfect and I have always been aware that this fosters contempt.

  So I sat in the backseat listening to Andy and was excessively grateful that we would never have to work directly together, because if we did, I would have to make things difficult for her. I did not want this. I had not wanted to hurt the other girl's career. I just could no longer work with her. I thought it was luck that I would never have to work with Andy.

  * * * *

  My work was always interesting. Those first few weeks were hard, but the work itself made working with Cassie bearable. I saw Cassie as cold and aloof. She spoke in monosyllables and she never gave her orders directly to me. She left them on lime green post-it notes on my desk. I can still remember the first set of notes I got.

  Read files on my desk.

  Go to Treatment planning in room A-5.

  Go to lunch.

  Observe Reality therapy group with Katie so you can take over tomorrow.

  Do afternoon room inspections for tomorrow’s reality therapy.

  Interview Mr. Benoit, Mr. Eaton, Ms. Aidon, and Mr. Nicca for tomorrow's treatment planning.

  Write reports-follow model on your desk – use DSM to code on all 5 axes.

  You can go home when you’re done.

  Dr. Allen

  Her aloofness was preferable to over-involvement, but it was strange on many levels. I think the thing that made it most strange was the fact that she trusted me to do my work without any real supervision from her. It was also strange because I had no idea what she did or if she did anything at all. Finally, it was strange because it was what I had always thought I had wanted from a supervisor. I was wrong. I was uncomfortable with her complete abandonment. I felt slightly helpless, like maybe I wasn’t as completely competent as I thought I was.

  I did everything her notes told me to do as thoroughly as I could. I read the files and hauled the stack of six binders down three stories to the conference room, shuffling keys and doors all the way. When I finally made it to treatment planning at 8 a.m., the room was much emptier than I had imagined it. There were only five other staff members present. The social worker, Ms. Gardner, was sitting in a corner making violent gestures and talking vehemently to the nurse who sat beside her. Beside the nurse was Dr. Yoshi. He was wearing a tight, brown windbreaker that looked like it saw its prime around 1982. He sat, huddled up in his chair. It almost looked like he was sleeping, although I couldn’t tell because his glasses were so large and darkly tinted that I couldn’t see his eyes. At the front, sitting away from the table, like guards, were two white clad mental health workers.

  Ms. Gardner shook her head when I walked in with the files. "Are you a student or an intern?" she demanded loudly.

  "Intern."

  "Good. I'm tired of students. The way they treat us over here you would think we were a damned nursery school. I swear that Babcock thinks we’re just here to wipe people's noses and teach them their ABCs, as if we don't have enough to do."

  I blinked, slightly blinded by the harshness of her tone. "I’m a doctor," I answered her. I emphasized the word doctor, hoping that my education might shut her up. Of course, it didn’t.

  "They come here to learn," she continued. "But they’re always loudmouthed, arrogant, and ignorant."
>
  The nurse, Nurse Brown, leaned towards me. "She had a bad experience with the last student. They had an argument over a patient's diagnosis and it was taken to the supervisors and the student's diagnosis stood. It matched the patient's diagnoses going back over 10 institutionalizations." Nurse Brown grinned triumphantly as she said this.

  "Oh, shut up." Ms. Gardner said. Her voice carried the lilt of a joke, but enough emphasis to remind us that she was serious.

  "So, what’s your name?" Ms. Gardner asked.

  "Dr. Black," I responded.

  "Is Dr. Allen going to grace us with her presence this morning?"

  "Doubtful, but I've read through all of her reports, so I feel fairly competent in taking her place this morning."

  "That'll be a first."

  "What?"

  "A student who actually reads or does reports and has anything insightful to add."

  "I'm not a student. I've completed my doctorate. I'm qualified to act in Allen's place and under her supervision."

  "Does she actually give you supervision?"

  "Oh, shut up," Nurse Brown said, mocking Ms. Gardner's prior tone. "Don't give the boy a hard time just because you have a grudge against Dr. Allen. I'm sure he's going to have a lot to add."

  "Weren't we supposed to start 20 minutes ago?" I asked.

  Ms. Gardner rolled her eyes at me. Dr. Yoshi laughed, sinking deeper into his chair. Nurse Brown signaled to the mental health worker who sat in the corner and he left the room. He returned a few minutes later pulling in a man in his sixties with his tongue hanging out. The man sat down next to me at the table and began to fidget. He kept putting his tongue in and out of his mouth and making an annoying slurping noise as he did this.