Circe

by Jessica Penot

  “Great,” I said bitterly. “I shared a woman with Mr. Fat? Wonderful. Jesus.”

  Andy laughed. “No. Mr. Fat has no claims to her, but everyone seems to know what’s going on.”

  “Pretty fucked up, huh?”

  “More than you know. How the hell has that crazy bitch held a job all these years?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m taking this to Babcock tomorrow morning, and I’ve already written a report and sent it to the APA ethics committee. Whatever nuthouse shit she is doing is over, and no amount of hoodoo or black magic can stop that now, especially if you’re willing to testify that you had sex with her.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have anything to lose anymore. Pria knows. Y’all know. She’s done a pretty good number on my head, obviously. Of course. You can tell Babcock about me tomorrow, but I can’t come with you. I can’t tell the story again. Just tell her it's too hard for me to talk about, but I’ll do whatever I have to do to make this nonsense stop.”

  Suddenly, Andy hit me in the shoulder. “You’re a real prick, though. How the hell could you cheat on Pria?”

  “I’ve been a prick for a long time. You guys know that. I wasn’t the nicest person in the world when you met me, but I’m going to change now. This has scared the shit out of me. I told Pria that, too. I might even find Jesus after this crap. God knows I need some higher power, because I’m certainly not cutting it.”

  John laughed. “You were kind of an asshole when we first met you. Was it Cassie that scared it out of you?”

  “I don’t know. It was everything. I just had a series of epiphanies, or maybe they were breakdowns, associated with everything that has happened over the last year. There have been too many cathartic moments for me not to change.”

  I moved to the front seat and John began the long drive home. We were oddly silent, considering the depth of the conversation behind us, but it felt like there was nothing else to say. The well of words had run dry, and there was only emotion left behind. Sorrow and fear. Anger and disappointment. All these emotions blended into a stifling fog that filled the car with a lamenting electricity that held us in quiet apprehension. None of us wanted to confront Cassie, but with Andy’s meeting with Dr. Babcock tomorrow, that confrontation became inevitable. She’d call us liars and all the patients would deny their claims in private out of fear of Cassie’s invisible legions. It would be a long battle that would cast a shadow over all of our careers. It could potentially be scathing for us all.

  Pria held my hand while I told her the long story of my day. She complimented me on my courage and told me I was finally becoming the man she had always known I could be. There was no comfort in her sweet words or her ever-growing belly. The shadow lingered on all of us, and my hallucinations came between me and any attempt at consolation. But Pria kept talking, kept soothing, kept kissing in her attempts to shut out what lay ahead and behind.

  * * * *

  Dr. Babcock attempted to handle Andy’s report and the impending investigation with the utmost discretion. She interviewed Cassie, John, and me. She spent the next two days wandering the halls of the chronic ward talking to patients and staff. Despite her professionalism and discretion, the gossip spread like a cold through a daycare. I could hear the nurses whispering when I rounded the corners, and I knew what people were saying. I was the intern who had fucked the bitch. Everyone knew it and very few tried to hide it.

  Dr. Donalds treated me with kindness. I could see the pity in his eyes. I knew he believed I was an innocent who had been seduced, and now he had a convenient explanation for all of my odd behaviors. Mercifully, the medicine helped my hallucinations. They ceased, and I was left to attempt to do my work and ignore the whispering. The week passed slowly. I had to tell the same story over and over again to the hospital director and the internship director and everyone else. I even had to write a report.

  By the time the weekend came, I was exhausted. The feeling spread out through all of my limbs and clogged my throat. Andy and John seemed tired and worn as well. We knew we had done the right thing. For the first time in my life, I had done the right thing, but the consequences reverberated into every aspect of our lives at Circe. It was worse for Andy and John. They had to face Cassie every day at work. They had to look at her glaring eyes and deal with the odd, indecipherable curses that appeared on their books and supplies.

  Pria and I slept through most of the weekend. She was tired from her long hours and pregnancy and I was just tired. We rented movies and ate fast food and slept. I rubbed her feet and we ate out. We didn’t talk. Our tongues were dry. We were waiting.

  CHAPTER 7

  This is a time of elemental disruption, of events

  which are entirely beyond your control.

  Unknown

  Hagalaz— Disruption

  We spend our lives engulfed in images of violence and terror without having any real taste of them. We are raised on movies and television that glorifies warriors and monsters, but we never see war. We watch death through the gleam of the television, but we live longer and longer. Terror has become a dream, something we imagine to entertain ourselves. We create more and more wretched demons and serial killers to fill our boring lives with a little of the bloodlust man once lived for. And yet, we remain impossibly detached. Pain is controlled. If we’re sad, there is a pill. Thank God for SSRIs. If we’re anxious, there’s another pill. Our true emotions are muted by medicine and we experience our only real glimpses of humanity through the vicarious imaginings of other people. War is far away and death is controlled. We die in hospital beds after lingering illnesses. It’s rarely sudden and never in our faces. The dead are hidden.

  Beneath all the horror we see every day in distant pictures (in Time or Newsweek or on CNN), there is some memory of what it is to really live. When I first glimpsed real terror, I experienced it like I was seeing it through a camera or on the television screen. It wasn’t real to me. But with each passing day, the gauze that had once covered my emotions and kept me calm and in control was being pulled off. I spent my nights watching Pria slowly fade away and my days haunted by gossip and shadows. I felt myself becoming a character from some play or movie. I was losing control, or maybe I had already lost it.

  I returned to work wearily. The hallucinations engulfed me. The medicine stopped working. I didn’t even think of them as hallucinations anymore. The better part of me had come to believe that Cassie and I had awoken the devil. Cybil’s words followed me wherever I went. The demon slept in the soil, cursing everything that had touched it—and we had awakened it.

  I sat in Dr. Donalds’ office staring at the blank computer screen that should have been a psychological report. I don’t know how long I had been sitting there. Time didn’t make much sense to me anymore. I knew it was there, but I had no idea of its movement. Circe came into my office with a hiss. I felt her long before she arrived. I didn’t turn around to face her. I was a coward.

  “She’s already dead,” Circe hissed. “We killed her this morning. Her blood fills my womb. It’s lovely.”

  I picked up the phone and called Pria at work. The same receptionist answered the phone as angrily as ever. She assured me my wife was fine and working with a patient. I hung up and tried to dismiss the message. I drifted through the day accomplishing very little. At around 2 p.m. Dr. Donalds pulled me out of an assessment and took me to the meeting room where Andy, John, and I had first been introduced to Dr. Babcock. We sat quietly, waiting for Dr. Babcock and John. I didn’t know what the meeting was about and apathy had swallowed me, so I sat.

  Dr. Babcock and John came in about ten minutes later. Everyone sat down and all eyes turned to our leader.

  “I don’t even know how to say this,” she said. “Y’all have been the strongest interns I have ever known. Everything you two went through with Dr. Allen and you were strong enough to speak out. You’re both admirable men.”

  She looked up at us, the hint of moisture in her eyes. “I have to tell you
that Andy died this morning. The police are investigating her death, but it looks like a suicide. She slit her wrists. I blame all this mess with Dr. Allen. I think it just put too much pressure on her.”

  John laughed and buried his face in his hands. I was completely numb. I couldn’t feel my legs or my cheeks.

  “You should both take a couple of weeks off. I have brought in some temporary help from the University. We’re going to need to restructure the internship program in any case, with Dr. Allen leaving, and we may even lose our status as an APA approved internship site. Y’all will get your credit. Everyone is going to make sure of that. I’m so sorry. Andy was a wonderful woman. She made a real difference here. She saved a lot of people from Dr. Allen’s abuse. You two can take the rest of the week off, if you need to. Andy’s family will contact you about the funeral arrangements.”

  “Thank you.” I said calmly.

  John just put his head on the table. I couldn’t find the words for either Babcock or John. Silence became a tangible presence in the cold, empty room. I could tell Babcock was searching for something poignant to say. She was going through the list of correct responses to grief that had been stockpiled in years of training, but too much had happened and there were no words. I put my hand on John’s shoulder and tried to find some identifiable emotion within myself, but there was nothing I could say.

  It was Dr. Donalds who finally found the right words “John, I can’t even imagine how horrible this must be for you.”

  John looked up at him and smiled. “She was an amazing woman. Few people will ever know how wonderful.”

  We left the building and gathered up our things. I found John sitting on the bench in front of the chronic ward in a little garden just beside the walls. He looked so lost in the noon-day sun. Patients shuffled by him mumbling greetings at his blank face. The peacock rooted around in the sand at his feet searching for crumbs. The groundskeepers were pulling weeds in one of the gardens near by. The hospital was bustling with life and activity, but he was somewhere else. I sat down beside him quietly.

  “We can go whenever you’re ready,” I said.

  “Cassandra Allen,” he said.

  “What did she do now?” I answered.

  “I told her that Andy had died and she laughed.”

  “She laughed?”

  “Yep.”

  “She said that Circe takes what’s hers and she laughed.”

  “She’s crazy, and she’ll lose her job and her license. She’ll never work in psychology again.”

  “She killed Andy.”

  My laughter was a taught mixture of hysteria and stress. “I know I’ve been crazy lately. I’ve talked about demons and ghosts, but I don’t give her enough credit to think she can create enough magic to hurt anyone but herself.”

  “Andy and I both thought you had lost it that night when you told us about the ghost, Circe. We thought you were stressed and broken, but since we reported Cassie I’ve seen that thing twice. She killed Andy and she’s going to kill us and Roy too.”

  “What does Roy have to do with this?”

  “We never listen to him because he’s a patient. But we have evidence now that she took him down there and did things to him. He has scars that he couldn’t have inflicted himself. He said she was going to kill him and we didn’t believe him because he was crazy. Shouldn’t we believe him now with all that’s happened? He told me she was going to kill Andy and me. He told me to take my wife and run.”

  “Roy is… Roy is exaggerating.” I was grasping for straws. I was reaching for some way to make the rational make sense again. I was trying to put together a world that no longer existed for me, when every part of me wanted to scream “Run!” but the facade remained. I was unable to let go of the mask. I couldn’t abandon the pretense of sense in a land of perpetual madness.

  “Roy said that when he summoned Caal, Caal told him this would happen. He told him about Circe and the witch and the leviathan. He said that you two were marked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m just really afraid, Eric. I’ve never been so afraid. I believe in the devil. I believe in ghosts. I mean, I’ve seen them in movies. I saw the exorcist, but I don’t know what is going on and I don’t want to face what is going on. Andy is dead and I can’t believe it was a suicide. I have to leave.”

  “And go where?”

  “I’m going home, to Florida, and I’m taking Angela with me. I’ll repeat my internship next year.”

  “Just like that.”

  “I think you should go too. I mean, whether or not we are just crazy, whether or not any of this is real. Cassie is real and this case is going to be all over the media and Andy is real and she died. This internship is over. I mean, we don’t even know if this place is going to be APA accredited when we graduate in four months.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “What about you?”

  “I need to finish this internship. Pria has already quit her job. She needs me to make money next year. She needs me to be a father. I can’t leave, plus, it’s too late for me in any case, right?”

  “You should leave too.”

  “You know I can’t. Pria is sick. She can hardly work now. She’s used all her sick days for the next year.”

  We walked slowly to the car. The fog seemed to rise out of the earth instead of descending from the sky. It crept over the ground kissing our feet and surrounding us with a sense of doom that felt more than appropriate. I found myself wishing I could take Pria and run away. I dreaded walking back through the gates into that hell. I wanted to take Pria and drive back to the cold and steam of Detroit. I longed for the old smells and the noise that Pria detested. There was no supernatural world there, only muggers and rapists and the half-crazed seeking solace in Zyprexa. That is the way it should be. I missed fear of the tangible.

  I tried to imagine a way to go back. I tried to imagine a job that would take me with an incomplete internship or a state that would give me a license, but there was no place. I had to finish what I started or I would never be able to take care of my babies.. I had been selfish all of my life. I’d taken what I wanted without regret. I’d used people up and spit them out. I’d been a hunter, searching for solace in the flesh of the lost. I had broken people to fill my own void. I was tired of being selfish. If I was damned, so be it, but I wasn’t going to take Pria away from her home again. I wasn’t going to make her work because I was afraid. I was going to do the right thing. I spat on the ground. I spat on the damp earth of Circe. My fate wouldn’t be dictated by something I couldn’t see or touch.

  Pria was soaking in the bathtub when I got home. The bathroom was filled with candles. She smiled at me over her round belly. She had left work early again; it was only 3:00 p.m. I sat down on the toilet next to the tub and rubbed her shoulders, staring at her growing breasts. She put her hand on my leg. The light cast odd shadows on her face, augmenting her bones and the shadows beneath her eyes. She appeared to be more of a wraith than a woman.

  “You’re home early,” she said.

  “It seems that the ghosts have risen up to avenge Cassie,” I said in a bad attempt at a joke.

  Pria laughed. “What? Have you been watching horror movies again?”

  “I wish. Andy is dead.”

  Pria turned to look at me. “Are you serious?”

  “She killed herself.”

  “Oh, God.”

  She stood up and dried off. She threw on her track suit and disappeared into the living room. She stood in front of the window looking into the gloom of our back yard. I drained and cleaned the tub for her. After, I followed her into the living room and stood in front of the window with her.

  “We are cursed,” she said.

  “Maybe.”

  “How do we fight what we can’t see? Is it her? Should we kill her? Should we curse her? If we kill Cassie, will it stop?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it that place? If we burn it, w
ill it go away?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Should we go to church? Should we pray?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I will not go quietly into this night.”