Circe

by Jessica Penot

  “It’s the best you’ll get from him,” John laughed.

  “Hey,” I said. I was unable to transition into what I really wanted to say smoothly, so I just blurted it out. “There have been a few deaths on the chronic ward lately and it’s been bothering me.”

  “What?” Andy laughed. “Are you serious?”

  “I just needed to run the scenario by someone with fresh ears. Things just seem off over there and I need to make sure it isn’t just me.”

  “You are being serious? What do you mean? Patients have died over there?”

  “A few. Their deaths are odd. They’re dismembered. Body parts are removed. No one seems to notice or care. The police came and asked some questions once, but they stopped asking. Cassie looks at me like I’m crazy when I ask about them. She says it’s the nature of a chronic ward for the patients to do crazy things.”

  “She says that?” Andy said with a furrowed brow.

  “How many people have died?” John asked.

  “Five now.”

  “Five people in less than four months?” Andy asked

  “That’s not right,” John answered.

  “I’ll do some research tonight. I’ll see if other floors have those kinds of numbers. I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Andy said.

  * * * *

  Pria wasn't home when I got back that night. I started to cook. I didn't cook often. I didn't do much housework, despite the fact that she often worked almost as many hours as me and earned three times as much. Pria took care of me. She had always taken care of me. Her scent lingered on my laundry and colored all the dishes stacked perfectly in the cupboard. I smiled as I took the food out of the refrigerator. It was so organized. Everything was perfect and clean. Pria took pride in everything she did.

  I was setting the table when Pria walked in. She looked immaculate, as always. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me on the cheek.

  "You made me dinner," she beamed with happiness.

  "Sometimes I'm not all bad?"

  "No, this is perfect. This is the perfect night for you to be the wonderful man I know you are."

  "It comes with a hitch," I said as I put the food on the table.

  "What's the hitch?" she said. She poured herself a glass of diet Dr. Pepper and sat down at the table.

  "You have to come with me to my boss’s house for dinner on Friday."

  "I get to meet the ominous Dr. Allen? I wouldn't miss it for the world. She's become almost legendary."

  "Wonderful. I'm sure it will bore you beyond belief. She’s a very strange woman and she talks incessantly about the most bizarre things."

  "I like bizarre things. I married you, didn't I?"

  "You have to be nice to me tonight. I cooked you dinner."

  "You have to be nice to me no matter what I do from now on, because I have some news."

  I shuddered. I knew what she was going to say before she opened her mouth. I felt it in my bones. Dread crept over me like a lover's hand.

  "I guess I should sit down," I said.

  "You know what I'm going to say?"

  "I think so."

  "I know you don't think we're ready, but I really want this. I didn't do this on purpose, but I want it and you'll be working next year so I can stay at home."

  "How far along are you?"

  "Eight weeks. I have an ultrasound scheduled and I'd like you to come."

  "Of course." I couldn't smile. I knew she was searching for joy in me. I knew she needed and desperately wanted me to throw her in the air and laugh in violent ecstasy. She wanted me to buy cigars or at least show some sign of life, but I couldn't feel or think anything.

  "Say something," she said. "Say you're happy. Say you want this baby, because it’s all I've ever wanted."

  "I'm happy," I said. "This is just very unexpected. I'm not good with kids."

  "We always said we were going to have kids. You said you wanted at least two. It's just a little earlier than we discussed."

  "I do. I just thought it was years away."

  "This baby will be a little piece of you and me. It will adore you and you’ll learn to be a wonderful father."

  "I have no role model for wonderful parenting."

  "I'll teach you." She kneeled down in front of me, placing her head on my knee. I looked at her soft black hair on my leg. I couldn't help but stroke it.

  "I love you, Pria. I'll love this baby. Anything that comes from you I'll love."

  "Thank you," she whispered. "We’ll be such a happy family. I promise."

  She talked about names while we ate, and baby showers and buying a big house in Foley after I got work, and decorating nurseries that didn't even exist. I smiled quietly at her and choked down all of my fear. I didn't want her to see the fear in my eyes. I didn't want her to know that children were like little monkeys to me. I had no idea how to take care of them let alone raise them. There would be no more mountains for me. No more chances to travel. There would be no great accomplishments or cold and distant peaks. Children silenced all of that. They trapped you in a world of dirty diapers and women who were too tired to touch you. I felt as if my life were over.

  Pria didn’t exercise that night. She sat on the couch eating popcorn. I rubbed her perfect feet and watched her laugh at the television. All of the stupid adages by decrepit grandmothers were true: she glowed. She radiated something I had never been able to give her. The life inside of her had swollen up and taken form in the texture of her flesh. I didn’t really see what was on TV. It didn’t matter. All I could see was the halo expanding around her, engulfing her, and swallowing me.

  CHAPTER 4

  I am no shepherd of a child’s surmises,

  I have seen fear where the coiled serpent rises.

  J.V. Cunningham

  Inguz – Fertility

  I saw a Pampers commercial once that gleefully announced that babies change everything. It was a collage of sappy half-painted images of tired parents and happy babies. This is true long before the infant explodes screaming from the mother’s womb. My house began to fill, within less than a week, with little bits of baby. Tiny booties, toys, mobiles, little yellow outfits (we didn’t know the gender yet). Pria signed us up for Lamaze classes and started taking pregnancy yoga. Our bedroom was littered with books on how to be pregnant, how to shape the perfect baby in utero, how to have the baby, and how to nurse the baby. Pria was the perfect mother long before the child was anything more than a cluster of cells. She cared more for that tiny lump of flesh than many mothers care for their children once they can speak.

  I was exhausted. I hated reading books over some sort of belly belt to a baby that lacked auditory function. My hands ached from the nightly foot massages and I was utterly repulsed by Pria’s endless whining and vomiting. The food in our house went from healthy to crap. All I could do was run. Literally and figuratively. I ran in the morning longer and harder than ever. I surrendered to the sound of my feet pounding on the pavement. I tried to imagine myself a machine, soulless and mindless, moving coldly through a landscape of endless silence.

  More importantly, I ran to my work. I spent more and more late nights there. I took on other people’s reports and spent more time tediously inspecting my work for flaws that didn’t exist. I did special visits to patients just to talk. I followed up on each and every assessment. I created work where none had existed before, and Cassie, meticulous as always, noticed. She was always there, helping me find reasons to stay late. Helping me find excuses to be away from my wife. Night upon night we spent together, sitting in uncomfortable chairs, talking about mythology or art.

  I became mesmerized by her. She was the opposite of Pria. She was cold and hard. There was no love in her, only a collection of old stories. One night I stayed until midnight. We sat in her office drinking coffee and chatting. Her blue eyes glowed in the dim lights.

  “I have another story for you,” she said.

  “Another one?” I asked. “Where do you get al
l these stories?”

  “It’s called reading.”

  “People still do that? Isn’t that why God made movies?”

  “Very funny. No, I found this wonderful collection of stories. It’s really an old journal I found in the old records building.”

  “What were you doing in the old records building? Don’t those files date back to before we were born?”

  “You have to know that I do a lot more here than take care of patients. This place is my life.”

  “I’m sorry about your life.”

  “So I found this old journal buried behind a stack of papers a century old. It’s beautiful, written by a nurse who worked here.”

  She handed me a tattered, mostly decayed notebook. I flipped through it, lingering on the pages with drawings. Faded faces gazed out at me from yellowed paper. Men and women working in the fields. Men with bruised cheeks and people locked in tiny cubicles. I read a random page somewhere in the middle. Whoever the author was—her signature said only Jane—described one of the female patients being raped by a staff member. I flipped through to another page, where there was a description of a monthly visit from the psychiatrist. Apparently, Jane looked forward to the doctor's monthly visit. He would walk by all the cells where the patients were kept and look at them, jotting down a few notes and making a few suggestions. She lived for his instructions to her. She breathed for the single glance he gave her before he drove away, leaving her to care for the mad men and women of Circe.

  She had also made some notes about the profits made from the labor pool at the hospital. The writing was very sterile, revealing total disinterest in the well-being of the patients. It was clear she viewed the patients as filthy and annoying animals. She relished one man’s beating. Her only human concern was her infatuation with the psychiatrist.

  “You find the most terrible things,” I said to Cassie as I handed the notebook back to her. “Do you also have a collection of tortured babies in your basement?”

  “I don’t do terrible things. I just find the people who are capable of evil to be interesting.”

  “You’re not alone. There wouldn’t be so many shitty serial killer movies if you were.”

  “You can’t see the value of this journal? It’s a little piece of history. It’s a little piece of the mystery that surrounds this place. She describes one patient being tortured to death without feeling anything. To her, he’s just some crazy nigger and the world is better off without him. That’s how they saw the patients then. Terrible things happened here.”

  “Terrible things still happen here. Just today Mr. Nicca threw feces at one of the nurses.”

  “Some day you should look through my library,” she said, motioning to a collection of ancient books and journals on the bottom shelf of one of her large cases. I wanted to ask why. I wanted to tell her I didn’t care, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t say anything that moved me away from her. I was paralyzed by my hunger.

  “I know the deaths here have bothered you. I just thought you should know they aren’t unique. This place has always been this way.”

  “It’s haunted? It kills people?”

  “I never said that,” she answered.

  “Then what?”

  “What if there is a world just beyond what we see? An entire universe, and every once in a while there is a tear in the veil that separates our worlds? What type of place would exist by such a tear? What type of people would inhabit it? What would people say of those people who could see through the veil?”

  She leaned forward, her chest heaving with the conviction of her words. Her eyes were wide with passion. I almost couldn’t hear her. What she said didn’t matter. I could only see the soft flesh of her breast and the angles of her cheek bones, the curve of her thighs and the sweat between them.

  So she and I sat in her cold office looking through old files and journals. We leafed through photos, pictures of men and women being used like slaves. We even looked at a few letters from the old fort, stories of prisoners and executions. One story stood out of a young girl kept there early on. It was written in Spanish, so Cassie translated. The girl had been caught doing something and had been whipped and tortured for treason. The girl had only been fifteen. The soil beneath us was stained with blood and no one seemed to notice. No one who worked or lived at C.R.C. cared. Most of the staff didn’t even know C.R.C was more than fifty years old. Only Cassie knew. She kept her collection of history behind glass and smiled as she caressed the bindings of her old books. She was lost in her ghosts.

  I went home to find Pria crying. She didn’t want me working late anymore. She accused me of lying, of not wanting the baby, of trying to get away from her. I dodged the accusations with carefully crafted lies. I smiled and kissed her face. I hid from the truth. I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t stop what I already knew was coming.

  Cassie didn’t talk to me about it. That wasn’t her style. She merely placed her ivory fingers on my shoulder at 8 p.m. and whispered in my ear. Her words were as cold as her hand, like a monitor lizard creeping up from its grave.

  “You’ll stay late regardless of the amount of work you have, so why not take a walk with me?”

  I did. We didn’t talk. All the patients were carefully tucked away on the ward floors watching TV and playing pool. The campus was dark and quiet. The occasional staff member wandered from one building to another in some perfunctory task, but they never peered through the shroud of shadow that encased us. We were anonymous in the night. No one cared what we were doing. Even the usually annoying security guards turned the other way as we passed them. We walked to the old acute ward. Its lofty cupola stared at us indifferently. Cassie smiled up at me and pulled a key out of her pocket.

  I didn’t ask any questions. There was no reason to. Questions seemed redundant. I went willingly on whatever bizarre voyage was ahead of me out of the desire to escape the future. I didn’t care why she was taking me into a boarded-up, dead building in the middle of the night. I had hopes, but it didn’t matter. We went in the back door, stepping over a pile of rubbish on our way in. We climbed a short staircase and entered a dust covered hallway. I could still see the hardwood’s finish beneath the dust. The elegant chair molding still cut into classic Victorian wallpaper. The wallpaper was chipped and mildewed, but it still stood as a testament to the wealthy professionals who once kept their offices on the main floor of this institution.

  I expected Cassie to take me up to the old patient wards. I expected a quiet room with a soft bed, but instead we crept into what looked like a closet and descended down into utter darkness. Cassie’s flashlight seemed to shudder in rebellion to the dark.

  “Where is this?” I asked, suddenly a little afraid.

  “It never got very cold here, but it used to rain and all the buildings were connected by a series of tunnels, so the staff could travel from building to building without having to go outside. The tunnels were condemned in the ‘50s and mostly collapsed. But a few rooms and tunnels remain. This is my tunnel.”

  I stopped for a moment to look at the walls. There were enormous words written in red magic markers up and down the hallway. I was afraid to stop and read. I didn’t want to get lost in the dark without a flashlight, so I followed my only light source into the forgotten recesses of the hospital, shivering in apprehension.

  At the end of the hall, there was a large locked door with a huge red triangle in the middle of it. Inside of the triangle was a pentagram. Cassie opened the door and we emerged upon a scene straight out of a bad Discovery Channel documentary on witchcraft in the modern world. There were candles in the corners, an altar, and symbols on the floor. I understood none of it, but that didn’t matter to me. The emotion was the same. I laughed.

  Cassie smiled. “I thought you would enjoy this.”

  “Did one of the old patients create this ridiculous shrine?”

  “No.”

  “Some crazy staff member whose wonderful history you’re going to regale me with?�
��

  “Yes. Do you want to hear the entire story?”

  “I always love hearing your stories.”

  I sat down on a rickety office chair that had been tucked neatly into the corner. Cassie sat down beside me.

  “This is the heart of Circe. This room is a temple to all those who know her. It is the place where reality stops and old gods come to life. It is the place where the tear in the veil begins, and those who come here never die.”

  “You’re insane, Cassie.”

  I looked around again. I examined all of the recently lit candles. The small fire that had been built in the center of the floor looked freshly made and warm. I studied the writing on the face of the altar. It was all her writing. I laughed again. I had been obscenely stupid. Only Cassie would be silly enough to create this homage to ancient myths.

  I laughed and shook my head at the same time. “You did this? Cassie, you’ve gone mad. I have no words.”

  “You laugh. I laughed once too. A long time ago when I had a family, I laughed. But they’re all gone now. This place is my only family now.”

  “Cassie, I have to tell people about this. You need help.”

  “They won’t let you do that. Don’t you understand? This place is magic.”

  “Magic? Up until now, in my mind, no matter what Jungian shit you professed to believe, I respected you. You liked history. I could ignore your morbid fascination because you…you were a force to be reckoned with. You’ve reached patients none of us could reach. You were cold and hard and your work was admirable. You were a mythical character here at Circe. Respected and hated. I have to admit, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about you and wanting you. I came here hoping for—you know what I was hoping for. Now I can’t respect you anymore than Abby White who receives telephone calls from the devil while she watches TV.”

  I could feel the rage brimming over in me. I wasn’t just angry at her. I was angry at myself for following her. I was angry that lust had led me to a cold basement filled with some old woman’s ludicrous attempts at religion. I was angry at everything that had gone wrong in my life. The sacrifices I had made for a wife who made decisions without me. The baby that was being thrust on me. My dead-end career. But mostly I was angry at Cassie. I felt as if I had been deceived by the woman I had believed to be a force of nature at Circe. I had respected and believed in her, yet she was no better than some nutty tarot reader in Cathedral Square in New Orleans. She might as well have been wearing a cape with stars on it and holding a sign that said “The End of The World Is Near.”