Circe

by Jessica Penot

  “You should go home. You should leave here and let me deal with this. I think you need to be someplace safe.”

  “I won’t leave you.”

  “John is leaving in three days. As soon as he can pack his things.”

  “He’s afraid, too? We aren’t crazy?”

  “He’s seen her.”

  “Cassie?”

  “Circe.”

  “Our hallucinations are contagious.”

  “Maybe this is a dream.”

  “Maybe we’re already dead.”

  “You should go. Go my love. Take care of my babies and go. I’ll come to you when I can.”

  “Come with me. You’ll die here. You remember what Cybil said. You’ll die here.”

  “Pria,” I whispered, stroking her cheek. “I’ve never been a good husband. I married you out of love, but also because it fit in with some picture of whom I thought I needed to be. I’ve struggled all my life to become the man my father told me, and showed me, was right. I got a good education, married a pretty girl and then shit all over it when I was alone. I’ve betrayed you in my actions and in my thoughts. I’ve betrayed our babies. I’m not the man you thought I was and I’m not even the man I want to be. I’m my father’s bastard and that is all. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of being a weak coward playing out the script that life handed me. I’m not running away from this. I’m not running away and watching you struggle to support our children while I redo my internship. You’ve earned the right to be with your babies in that beautiful house on the lake. I’m not giving up on that.”

  “If you die here, how will that help me?”

  “Life doesn’t work like this. I can’t believe life works like this. Ghosts don’t rise from their tombs and kill us. Demons don’t wander the earth. I refuse to believe these half-baked memories can kill me, and if they can, I have a very large life insurance policy to provide for you and we have mortgage insurance on the new house.”

  “I would rather have you and work, than be rich and not have you.”

  “Why won’t you acknowledge the possibility that all of this is just a delusion or a powerless apparition?”

  “Why can’t you see that this is real? Why can’t you accept what we all feel in our gut? That thing that we all see is going to kill us all! The devil could walk up to you and kiss you and you would look for your Thorazine.”

  “Because I’m a psychologist. The mind is a tricky beast. Memory is flexible, it molds to meet the desires of the person remembering. It changes as new memories are added and to meet the ever-changing cognitive constructs of the mind. What we’re so sure is real now, we’ll question later. We’ll realize that we were sleep deprived, stressed, and sick. We’ll see that Cassie showed us something terrifying and that we surrendered to that fear, and we’ll hate ourselves for giving in to her.”

  “Andy is dead. Memory won’t change that.”

  “Andy killed herself. She was tired and worried and scared.”

  “You run from the demon when you see it.”

  “I’d run from a hallucination too, that doesn’t make it real.”

  “I’ll leave after Andy’s funeral, but until then I’m going to spend every opportunity I’m given to badger you into coming with me.”

  I pulled her to me and smelled her hair. “Fair enough,” I said. “Pria, you have to know I want to run away. I’m afraid. I’m terrified. But I’ve never done the right thing in my life. I’ve never given up anything for someone else and now I need to do this for you. I need you to go away someplace safe so I can finish this. If I live, and I believe I will live, our future is set. If all the psychics are right, if what you believe is true, I will have died to provide a future for my family. Please, understand that I’m changing for you. Please forgive me.”

  “I’ve already forgiven you.”

  “But I haven’t.”

  The cold, damp air stilled the world around us until everything became wound up in waiting. The very molecules in the air became pensive. Pria packed. She put everything that really mattered to her in boxes or suitcases. Sadaf came to help. We moved silently, not speaking of the motive behind the movements. We were all afraid to say the words. I knew that somewhere, in midtown, John and Angela were also frantically packing. Although my words were brave, my heart was shrouded in cowardice. I felt the cloud creeping over the room with all the dread that Pria so vocally described. I longed to run away. I wanted to put my things in neat rows next to Pria’s in the suitcases, but I didn’t dare, so we worked on in the quiet of the winter air. I could hear Pria silently muttering prayers from various religions under her breath.

  Andy’s funeral would be on a Wednesday. We would have to go six hours north to Huntsville for it. Pria spent her days in her pajamas, muttering to her mother. I helped, avoiding eye contact. The drive hovered in our future. On Tuesday, Sadaf pulled me aside and slapped me twice. She swore at me in two languages and damned me for my unfaithful nature and for the curse I had brought on their house. She told me that she wished I had never been born and that she was holding her tongue out of love for her daughter. I averted my eyes, afraid to confront the accusations.

  At night, Pria and I slept entangled in each other’s limbs. We buried ourselves in each other’s flesh and wrapped our bodies around our souls. We held onto each other hoping that love would build us wings, that life would mirror poetry or at least, the movies, and that the end credits would roll as we clutched our children on some green, grassy hill. We searched for happily ever after in the few moments we had left with each other. We kissed and whispered inaudible promises into each other’s ears and we cried for reasons neither of us could speak of.

  Andy was buried in the foothills of the Appalachians. Huntsville is a small city of gentle rolling hills and forest. The town is wrapped in leaves and undergrowth and the concrete seems like the transient trappings of a brief occupation. Buildings and houses rise up out of the valley, but the kudzu surrounds them, waiting for its moment to reclaim the land. The people there are all engineers, brought there by an arsenal which produces numerous jobs designing missiles, rockets, and the occasional space craft. The educated and wealthy are everyplace; the poor and lost hide in their wavering gloom in the outskirts. It is a pretty place, which hides its despair well. It’s a perpetual suburb that borrowed its place from the earth.

  The hills opened up for Andy’s casket and greeted her like a friend. Her funeral was lovely and filled with more friends and family than I had given her credit for. Her family was eccentric in all the right ways. Her brother was a composer who played some strange, atonal piece at the ceremony. The music carried out onto the mountain they had chosen for the funeral, blending in with the bird song that surrounded it. He hammered away at the piano in rage and desperation, his streaked blonde hair moving violently with him.

  Her sister was majoring in photography at some art school. She crept around the cemetery dressed in black, taking pictures of the strangest details and crying into her lens. She’d sit in the dirt and photograph the bugs crawling over her sister’s tombstone or stand in front of random observers and capture the details of their mouths. Everyone ignored her strange wanderings, as if she was Andy’s ghost and not a living being.

  Andy’s parents were engineers. They quoted Tennyson, Camus, and Spock at the wake. Her mother, wrapped in long black bohemian skirts, wailed onto the coffin and cursed Cassie’s name at the funeral. At least a hundred other people wandered in and out of the services. They brought flowers and wept. The sun crept up over the crying masses, showing that the funeral was well attended by Circe’s staff. Even a few of Andy’s clients from grad school came and spoke mournfully about her therapeutic rapport. All the pieces of Andy’s life fell together at her dead feet, painting a picture of her as a wonderful person. She was a consummate volunteer, born of nerdy idealists who had sought to make in their children people who cared more about the world than themselves. In Andy, they had succeeded. She had joined the Peace Corps and
done missionary work. She had been doing volunteer work since she was twelve. Everyone respected her. Maybe that’s why she’d always made me uncomfortable: she’d been genuine in every emotion, and I had no idea how to be that way.

  After everyone deserted the cemetery, Pria took my hand and pulled me into the forest of tombstones. We wandered over the soft green grass, reading gravestones, until we found a playground nestled amongst them. The playground hid in the shadows of the cemetery, in between two hills, beneath and above the forest of death. It was old, filled with the type of playground equipment that had long ago been forsaken for wooden climbers and super slides. Everything was rusted and dangerous looking. It was difficult to imagine any real children playing on the broken metal, amongst the litter-covered gravel. Pria wandered over the pea gravel and sat on a rusty swing. She smiled as she swung back and forth. I sat on the archaic merry-go-round and watched her with an intangible mush of emotions. I wanted to smile and imagine her pushing our children in the swing on some golden day in the not-too-distant future. I tried to change the picture to become the Norman Rockwell painting of perfect family life. But the image was immutable, and all I could see was my sickly, pregnant wife swinging on a rusty play set deep in the heart of a darkening cemetery.

  I jumped when Mia’s camera flashed. Andy’s sister had been hiding somewhere in the gloom taking pictures. I turned to look at her round form, engulfed in black, clutching her camera like a weapon.

  “This is the dead children’s playground. That’s what they call it anyhow. We used to come here to get high, Andy and I, back in high school. Everyone comes here to get high. I guess we all had a morbid fascination. I don’t think kids ever play here.”

  “Maybe after a funeral?” I said lamely.

  “Yeah. Daddy just died, let's go have a ride on the swing.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Your wife is lovely.”

  “I’m so sorry about Andy. She was a good friend, she helped me… change.”

  “She had that effect on people. She saved me. She bought me my first camera.” Mia was crying. Tears poured over her white cheeks, staining them with the black of her eyeliner. She took a picture of me and walked away. I sadly watched her fade into the woods.

  Pria began to sing. Her voice was high and sweet, but not pretty. She was singing some old lullaby I had never heard of. My mother had never taught us things like that. The rain drove us away from our quiet place in the shadows. It exploded out of the sky like a bomb, covering the ground with mud and water. We ran, clutching each other’s hands, to the car. Inside we kissed on the moist leather seats.

  “We should just stay here,” Pria whispered as she kissed my neck. “It’s safe here. I can’t feel it here.”

  “What about our things?”

  “We’ll buy new things. It’s only money. That’s why God made credit cards.”

  “Pria…”

  “Shut-up.”

  We made love in the hotel room that night. It was desperate and emotional. It’s funny how stark the difference can be between making love and fucking. The same act, a reproductive act ending in ejaculation, can be an act of violence or the most powerful sacrament in your life. There was no similarity between the moments I shared with Pria that night, covered in the gentlest caresses and the rhythmic motions of love itself and the hateful thrusting I had known with Cassie. I cried in Pria’s arms. I covered her round belly with my kisses and tears and through it all I whispered “I love you” in the dark, over and over again like a metronome.

  We slept peacefully. There were no more dreams, and the fear slid off us like our wet clothes. We found solace in the rolling hills and deep forests. In the morning, we ate pancakes smothered with syrup and went to the top of Monte Sano to walk in the woods. It was lovely and serene. The trees were tall, peppering the limestone mountains with a stately grace. The light carved through the trees and decorated the path we walked. We could imagine the light on the ground before us was lace. We talked of everything but Circe. We didn’t mention Cassie or Andy or even John. We pretended that all we had to look forward to was the babies and the house. We were happy, holding each other in the breeze, whispering sweet nothings.

  It was unseasonably warm the day we drove home. We turned on the air conditioner and put on our sunglasses. The shadow that passed over us as we drove further and further south was as tangible as Pria’s hand in mine. Gradually, the color melted out of Pria’s face and I could feel something cover my heart like a death shroud. Finally, Pria began complaining of pain in her abdomen, and dizziness. I gently put her to bed. She seemed too tired to move or carry herself out of the bed. She slept for the rest of the day. Late that night, the cold came. She cried out to me and begged me to turn the heat on, but no matter how high it got, she was still cold. She, however, was on fire. I gave her ibuprofen and held her close and, maybe for the first time in my life, I prayed.

  I called the doctor for her in the morning and he comforted me with placating words. He reminded me that it was the season for illnesses. In February, everyone is sick with something. I knew I had to be at work. I was the last intern and with Cassie gone, they would be seriously understaffed, but I didn’t care. I went to get Pria’s antibiotics and sat with her until a little color returned to her face. I called Dr. Donalds and asked for yet another day off.

  Pria didn’t seem so bad the next day. The color had left her face and she was in considerable pain, but she was hopeful and eager to leave. We finished packing and made all the final preparations for Pria to leave Mobile. I held her while she cried, and stroked her hair. Finally she fell asleep and I was free to pace and worry.

  I didn’t leave Pria’s side until Sadaf came the next day. Sadaf gave me a scathing look and embraced her daughter passionately. I could see that the old woman had been crying, but tears had been replaced by anger and a strong facade. Sadaf busied herself loading all of Pria’s things into her car and trying to convince Pria that she had to leave. Pria only looked at me with her shadow-cast eyes and made one final plea, which I heard and obeyed.

  “Go to the psychic,” she begged. “The doctors can’t help me. Go to the psychic and ask her what to do.”

  My plan was to muddle my way through a half day of work, because it was made clear to me by Donalds that I was greatly needed, and then drive south to meet Cybil. I made an appointment with her and she made time for me without question. I hoped that my day would be mired mostly in mindless administrative work. I thought that in the absence of four staff members there would be a quagmire of incomplete paperwork that desperately needed my attention.

  Babcock was eager to tell me differently. She pulled me aside the moment I walked in the door. Dr. Donalds and she cornered me in her office and sat me down.

  “I’m not going to beat around the bush with you, Eric,” Dr. Babcock said. “We’ve lost our APA accreditation. I may even lose my job here. Cassie is gone. John quit. He didn’t give me any concrete reasons, but I know what is going on. Cassie scared him away with her hoodoo nonsense. I know you probably want to go now too, but we desperately need staff now and I think you’re the only one that can calm things down on the chronic ward.”

  “Me? I’m only an intern and let me tell you, the patients didn’t love me,” I answered. “Not to mention the fact that I haven’t exactly been at the top of my game lately.”

  “You’re mistaken. Mr. Nicca and Roy have been asking for you daily. We don’t have a psychologist over there right now and although we are recruiting eagerly, it may be a month or more before we can replace Cassie. Look, I’ve talked to the board and they say I can give you full credit for your internship if you stay until I replace Cassie. I had to pull some serious strings to accomplish this. I have connections. They want to pull you and make you apply and start over again with a new internship next year, like John. I know neither of us want this.”

  “You’re right with that.”

  “I’m just trying to hold this department together
. Since the Cassie incident, we’ve lost all the psych technicians on the chronic ward as well. We are floundering and everything over there seems to have escalated.”

  “How did you lose five people on the chronic ward?”

  “One died, three quit, and Kate was admitted to the hospital after she was sexually assaulted on the third floor.”

  “Kate was raped?” I asked, incredulous. “Who did it?”

  “One of the mental health workers.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t say right now. This is yet another legal nightmare.”

  “Is she okay?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s on paid leave now and I’m pretty sure she’ll get workman’s comp, but she won’t come back here, not even to clean out her office.”

  “I’m sorry about that. Kate was a strong therapist. She worked hard.”

  “It’s been a terrible month.” Dr. Babcock seemed on the brink of tears. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and her hair was frizzy and askew. She seemed to be hovering on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

  “Are you a superstitious woman, Dr. Babcock?” I asked as I looked at the runs in her pantyhose. “You don’t strike me as one. I think you and I have a lot in common, theoretically. I’ve never believed in anything I couldn’t measure, but I have to admit my faith in reality is melting here. This place is being torn apart by something.”

  “It’s being torn apart by Cassie!” Babcock’s professionalism vanished in a wave of anger. “Don’t mistake one woman’s corruption for the devil. Kurt hanged himself because he had sex with Cassie. The three that quit got some sort of voodoo symbols on their desks and Kate was assaulted by a mental health worker Cassie had been toying with. She’s a poison and she’s done everything to undermine this hospital out of spite. Quit if you want to, Dr. Black, but don’t tell me you’re quitting because the devil is chasing you, because I’m here to tell you he doesn’t exist!”

  “I’m not quitting.”

  “Good. You can take Cassie’s place in the chronic ward and you’ll meet with me weekly for supervision.”