“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.
I went to my counseling sessions. I saw Roy once. We talked about Cassie and I just listened. I listened to him rambling about their orgy with Caal without stopping to question him. I just let him talk and cry and lament the death of his family. I gave up cognitive psychology and fell victim to Carl Roger’s active listening style of therapy. My heart went out to Roy, and the more I talked with him the less I could believe that he was evil in his core.
Despite all my good intentions, in the end, I did pack my bag for the weekend conference. I sat in my kitchen with Pria and held her hand while she cried. I promised her that I would come back early, but when Cassie’s red BMW pulled up I left quickly with a wave and a smile.
I looked Cassie over with increasing disdain. She wore a skirt that was just shy of being too short to be professional and a blouse that was unbuttoned further than it should be. Her glasses were off and her hair was down. She spread her legs just far enough apart so if I had tried to, I could have told her the color of her panties. We exchanged the usual pleasantries. I pulled out the largest book I could find and began to read it.
We drove through Mississippi slowly, then over a causeway into the grubby city of New Orleans. I had been making pilgrimages to New Orleans with my brothers since I was boy. This was the first time I had gone for work. We stayed in a nice hotel, much nicer than I ever had before. Cassie and I had neighboring suites, but I tried to ignore this as I slipped quietly into my room.
The view from my suite was incredible. I could see the river and all of the French quarter. I found myself missing Pria. She would have loved staying in a room with a view like this. She loved sight-seeing and dreamt of rooms with views in far off romantic places. I could almost see her sitting by the window with her legs drawn up under her chin, healthy and vibrant again.
Cassie’s knock on the door brought me out of my fantasy. I opened the door without removing the chain.
“Would you like to join me for drinks?” she asked.
“Where?”
“The Old Absinthe place?”
I wavered. “I guess.”
It was cold out, so I got a martini. Cassie got a mint julep.
“I love this place,” she said after a while. “It is a true celebration of all aspects of humanity.”
“What?” I said distractedly. I was sick of her diatribes.
“Look over there.” She pointed. “You see that group of born again Christians?”
I turned to look at a small cluster of young people in ties and dresses clutching brochures. They were thrusting the brochures into the hands of any unfortunate soul who happened to make eye contact. Occasionally, they cornered someone to tell him about the damnation of his unsaved soul.
“They’re pedaling their salvation right across from a man who just gave a teenage girl three sets of plastic beads to show him her pussy.”
The crowd roared as the young girl lifted up her skirt. A group of fraternity boys chanted, “Show your pussy.”
“It’s all here,” Cassie was saying. “Sex, salvation, thievery, addiction, pornography, and even heroism. I love this place. If you watch carefully you can see all aspects of man lost in these urine soaked streets, struggling to find something they lost.”
“Yep.”
“Why did you come here?”
“I don’t know. Why do people watch vampire movies? Everybody knows vampires are bad. They’d eat your babies if they got the chance. But everybody wants to watch them. You’re ridiculous, but I keep watching you.”
“You know why people love vampire movies? Because everyone secretly longs to be a vampire, or at least someone as powerful as one. They long to be different, to be something more than the cattle. Maybe that’s why you came with me. You wanted something different. You want to be more than flesh and blood.”
“You know what? We have to get up early and I’m going back to my room. Have fun.”
She put her hand on mine as I stood up to walk away. “Are you really going to bed? Or are you going to look for another peacock?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you find her here? The little girl you ra
ped?”
I pulled my hand away from hers as violently as I could. All I could think was that I hadn’t hit her hard enough when I had the chance.
“I have no idea what you mean!”
“The girl that read you the runes? You don’t remember? You took her into an alley and pushed her against a wall and raped her.” Her voice had become sweet.
I sat back down. “Lower your fuckin’ voice! How the hell do you know about this! I didn’t rape her! I have never done anything to a woman that she didn’t want! Never! I’m a married man. I’m a good man!”
“No. You’ve never been a good man. You’re a man who takes what he wants. Women are just a game to you. You’ve never stopped to notice if they really wanted what you took. Women are like your mountains, things to be conquered.”
“What the hell do you know? You fucked me once, and you were the one on top, you fuckin’ whore!”
“You’re not worried about your references now, are you? Not worried about the future or your career. You don’t care if I write you up, because you’re an animal. You’re a monster pretending to be a man.”
“You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. I don’t know how you found out about the fortune teller, but whoever you have been talking to hasn’t told you even a shadow of the truth. That girl was taking me to her house, to her bed. She wanted me and I made a mistake. She seduced me.”
“She told me about it.”
I shivered. An old lady was singing "Amazing Grace" in some alley somewhere, and her voice rose above the bedlam. The clip-clap of two boys tap dancing with quarters imbedded in their shoes quickly superimposed the woman’s voice.
“The fortune teller told you?” I whispered.
“No. You know who. She’s been talking to me too. Circe has been talking to me for a long time.”
“I’ve got to go.” This time I walked away. I pushed my way into the crowd. I kept replaying that night in my head. I couldn’t remember what the girl had said to me. All I could remember was her beautiful body arched against the wall and her cool flesh against mine. I could still taste her, but I couldn’t remember if she had said yes or no or wait. No. No. There was no way that Cassie could make me question myself. Cassie was a crazy whore. That girl hadn’t fought or kicked or screamed. She had given herself to me. Another alley. I was in another alley and I was painfully alone in the dark.
I knew it was her when I heard her footsteps. The gentle tap of her high heels on the pavement. “Why don’t you leave me alone? What do you want from me? I’m talking to Dr. Babcock when we get back. This is sexual harassment and I’m tired of it.”
“If you do that, I’ll tell your wife about all the other women. All of them. Especially the little girl in the alley.”
“Why do you keep saying that? She wasn’t a little girl!”
“Oh, how old was she?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“She could have been twelve for all you know. She went to the police you know, but they just put her rape kit in a closet with seven hundred other unsolvable rapes. If I went to the police and they matched your DNA with the DNA in the kit, they could arrest you.”
“What!? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to throw me up against the wall like you did her and fuck me until I bleed.”
“Fine.”
* * * *
The conference itself was boring. The monotonous drone of ancient psychiatrists and psychologists was completely washed over by images of Cassie in my head. Every free moment we had, we fucked. I call it that because that was all it can be called. It was violent and dirty, in places and positions that broke more than God’s laws. Her sinewy body could distort itself into positions that the devil himself would turn away from.
I didn’t know what I was doing. Maybe I just wanted her to shut up. I couldn’t take her insane ranting anymore so I did the only thing I knew how to stop it. She just kept taunting me with the same mindless drivel. Circe told me. Circe whispers your secrets to me at night. Who was Circe! I was incensed. Fury pulsed through my veins and every aspect of every sin I committed was laden with the desire to defile and degrade Cassie.
The last day we were there I left the conference. I left to find the fortune teller. I was determined to find absolution from the irrational crimes that Cassie had accused me of, and the girl was the only one who could exonerate me.
I wandered Cathedral Square asking every psychic in the area if they knew a girl with a peacock on her back. No one knew her. No one had ever seen her. I spent two hours searching for every obscure voodoo and magic store in New Orleans, looking for some trace of the girl. I found nothing. She was a whisper of smoke in a dream.
I found only Circe’s ghosts in the center of New Orleans. I saw her again, the woman in white. She sat quietly on a bench smiling at me. Her black hair was tied back neatly in a bun. She signaled to me and I went over to her. Her breath was sweet.
“Hi, I’m Jane,” she said cheerfully.
I laughed.
“Why is that funny?” she asked.
“One of my patients said he knew a ghost named Jane.”
“Maybe he was talking about me?”
“Who are you? What were you doing at C.R.C.? Do I know you?”
“You know me and I know you’re looking for the girl with the peacock on her back.”
“Where is she?”
“She left. She ran away. You won’t find her here, but don’t worry. Don’t worry. She blames herself for everything that happened. If she were here, that’s what she would say.”
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
She smiled and disappeared into the crowd. I stood there for a long time looking at the place where she had been. Finally, I sat on a bench in front of the Cathedral and put my head in my hands. I don’t know how long I sat there before Cassie sat down beside me. I didn’t care. I was numb to the sound of her endless cackling voice.
Cassie seemed surprisingly chipper. “Couldn’t find her? What did you think?”
“What are you? How do you know her? Is she a sister or cousin, what?”
“I told you. Circe showed her to me and that is all.”
“Who is Circe you crazy fuckin’ bitch!’
“The one who comes to you in your dreams. The one who brought us together that night in the basement.”
All the rage in me swelled up into a knot in my throat and got stuck. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. Suddenly, all I could think about was Pria and the baby. She had seen the thing too. Rage swiftly melted into terror, not for me but for my wife. If there was some slim chance that the creature from my dreams was real, then it was with Pria, my beautiful Pria.
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you know? I thought you would know.” She seemed disappointed, as if she had made some drastic miscalculation.
“Know what? I don’t understand where all of this is coming from or why you’re playing this game with me.”
She laughed a kind of desperate laugh. “You haven’t seen her? The creature. The thing?”
“All I see is a pathetic old woman using her power to badger and harass me. Maybe you can read the cards and you’ve seen my affairs, but it isn’t your business to make me repent. You’re no priest.”
“Are you even capable of remorse? I thought you were without conscience.” The hate slid off her tongue like liquid. I couldn’t explain why she hated me so much.
“I can’t pretend to understand and I don’t want to get Babcock involved in any of this. I have as much to lose as you, so let’s just pretend this didn’t happen. Give me a good review and we won’t talk about it. I’ll avoid you next week and you do the same.”
“You haven’t seen her?” She seemed desperate and confused.
“I don’t know who you mean.” I lied again. She didn’t know everything. She reached out and touched my cheek. There were tears in her eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to ask or care why s
he was crying. I kissed her despite all the hate and rage; maybe my lust was just a manifestation of these emotions. Maybe Cassie was right, and I was only an animal, but introspection was lost in the strange spell I had become locked in. I surrendered to the power that had been driving me. We had sex one last time and then it was over. We drove home in silence. I couldn’t help but feel as if we had both lost our souls somewhere in those tunnels beneath the hospital
CHAPTER 5
You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.
Sara Teasdale
Raido—A Journey
Pria was waiting for me. She was up watching old episodes of "Sex and the City" and doing her maternity yoga. She looked pale and gaunt in her lime green track suit. She looked up at me and knew immediately that something was wrong, but she did not stop stretching. The wind blew and the house shuddered in the dark.
I was tired. Fatigue washed over me like a warm bath. It covered every aspect of my being. I looked at my slightly disheveled and eternally hopeful wife with infinite regret. She had never lied to me. She had never led me on. She had always done what was best for me. Behind her lay a vast road of long sacrifices. She had married me young and endlessly pushed away her ambitions for mine and through it all I had hated her. I had resented her for nothing, when there had been a time when she had consumed me like a wicked fire. At first, she had been the unattainable goddess, and then my rock, and then dead weight, and now I realized I had never seen her at all. I had only seen my own reflection in her eyes.
She was patient and kind and afraid. She loved me, but often regretted her own decisions. I saw all of this flash before my eyes as she sat on the ground doing her yoga. She had always fought so hard to be a better person. She always wanted to find perfection of body, mind, and soul. I had only cared about the external. I shook, tired of being myself. I was tired of working to maintain the façade of perfect strength. I was tired of lying. I was tired of betraying the only person who had ever really cared for me.
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