Still

by Charlee Jacob

  She fully expected to write a paper and perhaps even a book about Beta. Would she be bold enough, rash enough, to include her own eccentric, erotic memoirs as applicable elements of the experimental?

  Just the thought of the (in)fame this might bring her got her even more excited.

  These days, the only ones who truly remained detached were dead.

  And, according to the display on Peter’s skin, even this might be a fallacy.

  Nika heard a key in the front door lock.

  “He’s home!” she told herself.

  Visions of spreadeagled sugarplums danced in her head…and raised the hair on the back of her neck.

  Nika jumped up from the sofa and fluffed her red mane. But it was Diane Beta who stepped into the living room.

  “Dr. Noll… What are you doing here?” A surprised Diane asked, hands on her hips.

  “I’m—uh—treating Peter. As a p-patient,” Nika stammered.

  Diane ground her teeth, then spat, “Dressed like that? Or should I say undressed like that? You into the Masters and Johnson technique?”

  Oh shit, Nika thought. There was a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  “I don’t know how long you two have been doing this, but he’s still my husband. Where’s my Peter?” Diane demanded to know.

  Nika almost laughed, a most inappropriate joke coming to mind. Instead she put up her hands. “Hey, he and I only just became intimate yesterday. You walked out on him, remember?”

  Diane huffed. “And to think I came here to talk things out, try to patch it up.”

  Then she considered and added, “Then you’ve seen his body? Those murder pictures all over him? You sick bitch. You deserve each other.”

  Diane turned on her heel and left the house.

  Nika whispered, “You weren’t good for him anyway. Too judgemental, too uptight. I should know; I’m his doctor.”

  ««—»»

  Peter was wreckage. He made it into the house, saw Nika without registering how fetchingly she’d dressed for him. He started toward a chair to sit down but didn’t make it. He crashed, butt first, onto the floor.

  She ran to him.

  And he told her about his afternoon at a friend’s store, the movie he hadn’t seen since he was nine, when his childhood friend died. He explained about getting sick himself after viewing scenes he didn’t remember. About Dunk Friedhof wanting to exhibit him in some exploitational venture. As if he were the geek flavor of the month.

  Pete trembled and his voice was weak. She held him, stroked his hair, tried to ignore the waves of heat beneath his clothes.

  ««—»»

  She had him lie down on the floor, a chenille pillow under his head. She stood across him.

  He’d noticed yesterday, after they stripped fully in the Betas’ bedroom, that she had unsually long, soft hair in her genital area, which she plaited. She also wore a ruby pendant around her neck, strung on a ribbon. She slipped off her robe, then took this ruby off and tied it by its ribbon to the pubic braid.

  “What are you going to do?” he asked.

  She was perfectly serious. “Hypnotize you. Regress you to when you were nine and your friend died.”

  He couldn’t help smirking. “Uh, is this S.O.P. for you?”

  “Standard Operating Perversion? No. In the rare instances I deem hypnosis to be a viable therapy in a particular case, I do it the old fashioned way.”

  “Just wave the jewel back and forth and repeat you’re getting sleepy?”

  “Actually I tie it to that gold ring through my nipple,” she joked. “That’s how everybody else does it, right?”

  “Well, that would work, too.”

  Her voice changed, smoothing out, becoming a monotone. “Relax. And just watch the ruby. Keep your eyes on the ruby.”

  She’d placed one bare foot to each side of his shoulders. She gyrated those magnificent hips, swiveled from the supple waist. She swayed back and forth, to and fro.

  There was no way he could take his eyes off of that. A ruby the size of a quarter, at the end of an elegant little red braid.

  Nika undulated and the gem was a pendulum to her clockworks.

  Her voice was cherry ice cream, a pool of cool Shiraz. “Look at the pretty jewel, Peter. Your eyelids are getting heavy but you can’t look away.”

  Damn straight he couldn’t look away. Yeah, he was fully concentrating on this, the sparkle of the stone’s dark color against her creamy thighs and the pearl of her clitoris glistening in the nest of hair.

  “Heavy, Peter. Drow……sy. All the tension of the past several days tick tocking away…”

  The gem’s many facets trapped the light and reversed it on him as an irresistible perfume.

  Sway swing to and fro tick tock…

  Gem and hair red as an exit sign.

  Red as a solar flare corona at the beginning of a movie.

  “And the road leads to nowhere. And the castle stays the same,” Peter sang in a boy’s falsetto.

  ««—»»

  Hitcher with a red wine birthmark. Head cheese talk. Nothing wasted. Hitcher cuts himself, giggles loon shit.

  Now, both of these kids who’d sneaked into the theater were Texas-born. They knew inbred from Shinola.

  Later, the guy in the wheelchair eating barbecue. And it looks like a crackly penis rind sticking out of his mouth.

  Curtis remarked, “Please, dude, somebody kill Franklin.”

  Peter snorted. “Relax. He’ll probably be the first to go.”

  (’Cept he wasn’t.)

  Curtis had been moaning softly from time to time.

  In the movie Pam and Kirk find the house…

  Pig squeals. Don’t go in there! It’s…

  sui…sui…sui

  -cide-

  Curtis stood up, legs wobbling. He headed for the aisle, little body bent almost double.

  Peter hissed, “Curtissssss, where you going?”

  “To the bathroom,” the other boy replied weakly.

  “Man, you can’t. You’ll get caught…”

  “I’ve got to. No soda cup’s gonna hold this.”

  “Shit! Want me to go with you?”

  “No. Maybe they’ll think I’m here with my folks and not think twice. I’ll be back…”

  An instant later: first shot of Leatherface.

  Peter forgot about Curtis for a while as the movie cranked up to grotesquely compelling backwoods hexistentialism.

  In seats nearby, couples stuck their mouths together and made gross sucking noises, their popcorn-buttery hands squeezing mutual wet zones. Rednecks whooped, speaking in divinely delirious trailer trash tongues.

  Kirk and Pam and Jerry come to understand how those cows feel at the slaughterhouse. No life is sacred. Everything eats something.

  I am meat; we are all meat.

  Pete realized fifteen minutes had elapsed. Curtis wasn’t back. A quarter of an hour. That couldn’t be right.

  “I gotta go check on my friend,” he mumbled as he inched down the row, avoiding a writhing tangle of make-out legs. “‘Scuse me, please. ‘Scuse me.”

  There were people in the way, sitting in the aisles. He stepped around and over, moving out of the theater and as casually as possible toward the restroom. Situated between the dark theater and the overly bright lobby, it was a gray area.

  The lobby was deserted save for a pimpled hippie who ran the concession stand. His back was turned as he made fresh popcorn.

  Peter opened the door to the men’s room. There was a short, blind entranceway which concealed ‘business’ from those who might be standing in the hall. Then a turn which showed the urinals, sinks and stalls.

  He saw three males in there. Pete started to step around the corner into the restroom, but decided to hang back.

  It sounded wrong. It looked wrong. He peeked around the corner.

  One guy had Curtis bent forward over a sink. The child vomited and cried simultaneously, unable to fight the pederast or to sc
ream for help. Blood and shit ran down the backs of his legs.

  The other adult leered, loopy as the freaks in the movie. He clutched an expensive-looking camera and busily snapped pictures.

  Peter gasped, hearing his friend’s voice inside his head. Somebody help me…

  Curtis didn’t articulate this. He couldn’t past the sobs and spews.

  Peter suffered explosive anguish, just as Curtis’s body convulsed—both from the force of food poisoning or whatever was wrong with him and the relentless thrust of his rapist. It scorched up and down Peter’s own rectum, knotted his bowels, ignited bile which might have projectiled down a sink drain. He held everything in, his eyes watering.

  He discovered he couldn’t move, as much held in place as Curtis by what felt like a sweaty fist gripping the back of his fragile neck.

  These guys are babbling. But what are they saying?

  “Komme sie so schnell wie moglich!”

  “Ich habe henug zeit!”

  He saw an open stall where his friend might’ve been earlier. One tennis shoe rested on the floor in front of a toilet he could have been dragged from.

  Pete pressed against the cold tile wall, head turned to watch just around the corner. He could do nothing but observe. Couldn’t cry for help or run for help.

  He prayed someone else would come in. None did.

  Destiny had contrived that this wicked scenario be for the four of them alone: two children, two monsters.

  The men didn’t even notice Peter. In the mirror above the sink, Curtis’s face reflected shock, his image on glass spattered with pinkish-red vomit. The kid seemed able to see Peter, pressed against the wall. His eyes pleaded.

  Only you can save me.

  Yet he couldn’t save him. His legs trembled until Peter sincerely believed they’d fail him any second.

  Click click. Creep took pictures.

  Grunt grunt. Sounded like the pig squeals in the movie.

  “Kommen sie hier, Dunkel!” the man hurting Curtis exclaimed, tone gutteral as the chainsaw Peter heard through the walls. The man with the camera shook his head. “Nein! Es us nicht ganz das, was ich suche.”

  The rapist made a face as he pumped, exasperated. “Es tut mir leid, ich habe mich geirrt! Nicht Der Familie Geschaft?”

  Click click. Shrug.

  The assailant laughed, “Kein lammfleisch fur Friedhof, eh?”

  He suddenly released his grasp and the boy slipped, chin striking the sink’s hard porcelain rim with a loud crack.

  Peter felt his friend die, vileness sliding into the dark, skidding away down a hematoma shoot.

  The two men dragged Curtis back to the toilet and propped him up, the boy’s face a grimacing stare. They closed the stall door.

  The rapist began washing himself. Evidently before assaulting Curtis, he’d removed his jeans and set them aside so as not to mess them up with the boy’s sickness. Now he put them on again. Soon they must spy the other boy.

  Peter forced his body away from the wall and practically threw himself through the door, into the corridor’s gray zone. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the tile he’d been temporarily paralyzed against. There was an image of what had just happened to poor Curtis burned into the cheap porcelain squares, a grisly mural etched within a hazy outline of Peter’s own shape.

  He’d been unable to hold this pain and terror inside him. Hysteria and degenerate nightmare. Surely they’d be after him next. They must have heard him push back out the door. Then they’d see the vision on the tile. He had to hide. In the theater. Safety in numbers.

  He understood without the knowledge of full particulars that he’d put that image there. It had fired out of his skin, as a confession in stark black and white about witnessing an act he couldn’t assimilate, couldn’t prevent, could never hope to avenge.

  Peter didn’t even realize that the two men didn’t follow him into the theater. A synapse or two popped off like a breaker box in a basement, short-circuited until completely out. He’d made it back to the front rows and sat down, unaware of what happened.

  It was an hour into the film. He’d been away another fifteen minutes. Yet there existed no critical memory, no sense of personal danger or loss. Sick Curtis had left for the restroom and never returned.

  Damn, his friend was missing one helluva movie. Wouldn’t he be sorry?

  Sorry…sorry…

  The screams of the actress—Sally was her character—struck Pete all the way into his bone marrow. They were hammerblows to his skull, resounding sepulchral spikes. She was the most fuckin’ amazing shrieker.

  Somehow this set him free.

  Wasn’t that the strangest thing?

  ««—»»

  “So why do I love horror movies?” Peter asked, confused and badly shaken. “Seems to me I’d have an aversion, big time.”

  Nika patted his hand where they sat together on the sofa. “It’s called ‘Reaction Formation’. You express an unacceptable impulse by transforming it into its opposite.”

  “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “Look, you ran back into the theater for safety from those terrible men and blocked what you’d witnessed. As if you had never left the movie. It became your psychological alibi, your refuge.”

  “And you say I spent time in—that place. I don’t even remember that.”

  She nodded. “It was less than six months in the facility. Shock treatments can have an adverse effect upon a memory.”

  Nika had discovered this in Beta’s medical records. Severe post-traumatic stress. She didn’t know if it was behind the ability to produce the skin images or not. Also, there was nothing in the Texas police report about any picture being on the theater’s men’s room tile.

  Perhaps the killers had cleaned it off. Maybe it faded with Peter’s memory.

  “You looked Curtis’s murder up?”

  She had her legs drawn under her, sitting as a fawn upon the cushions. “The Internet has brought the world to the head of a pin. There was no trace of semen found in Curtis. Either the man didn’t ejaculate or it was washed away in the dyssentery flood. You told the police your friend was sick. The autopsy showed he’d definitely been that.”

  Peter’s voice cracked. “They got away because of me.”

  Nika frowned. “You can’t blame yourself. You were only nine. What you saw was ferociously traumatic.”

  He held his head in his hands as he admitted, “I’ve been friends with Dunkel Friedhof for a few years. How come I didn’t recognize him? Shouldn’t there have been a spark when I saw him again after all that time?”

  Nika seemed momentarily uncomfortable, contemplating some serious gravity. But then she replied, “It’s been more than twenty-five years. He’s at least twice as old as when you saw him in 1974. He’s practically an old man.”

  Peter sighed heavily, wishing the regression had left him drained of emotion. In movies, the doctor always brought the patient out of it saying something like, “You will awake refreshed!”

  Pete felt anything but refreshed.

  His entire life had been a lie.

  Maybe that’s what this slaughter stigmata on him was: a punishment. Head’s up, fool.

  It occurred to Peter. “Dunk’s still into snuff, both fictional and real. I should go to the cops, because I remember.”

  Nika gestured an affirmative with both hands. “You’re in a position, you know, to help them with more than just Curtis’s case.”

  He stared at her, incredulous. “You mean, show them?”

  Hadn’t enough people seen this curse?

  And as cops, they were a skeptical, suspicious lot. (According to movies and television.)

  Clay McFadden had told him that seeing the image of the small blond boy killing his father, Zane, almost fifty years ago had given him a kind of closure.

  “They’d hardly believe you if you didn’t show them,” she gently pointed out. “Most of those involved are surely dead anyway, but this might close cases and solve long-s
tanding mysteries. I’ll go with you, if you like. As your doctor, I can swear to the genuineness of your pictures. I’ve done tests. I know they’re not faked.”

  He was grateful for that offer. He thought to himself, I’ll finally come through, Curtis.

  Nika was still naked, the ruby bobble tied with ribbon at the end of her pubic pigtail made her a lustful Raggedy Ann.

  He didn’t think anyone had ever been so oddly placed into regression. Strip hypnosis, its time had come.

  “You need to relax,” she said, untying the jewel, standing up to get her clothes. “Let’s go back to my place.”

  “What can we do there we can’t do here?” he asked, waggling his eyebrows.

  She didn’t answer. She just led him the few houses over. When he saw the hot tub under the gazebo in her back yard, he knew why. The interior had been vividly painted with scenes from the Kama Sutra. Penises and cunts in imaginatively geometric poses, slinky spines and double-jointed legs, faces displaying rapture—or groin deep in it. With the steam and motion from the hot jets of water, the scenes appeared to move. But they weren’t frightening as those on Peter were. It made him grin as it lent an entire dimension to the term ‘water sports’.

  Nika tickled his balls. “You won’t rat me out to The Damned Neighborhood Association, will you?”

  Her pager went off.

  “Shit,” she muttered under her breath.

  An emergency with a patient. The woman had slit her wrists in a tad more than her usual despair. And she’d done it at a sperm bank she’d broken into, after consuming the day’s inventory.

  “You stay and soak. There’s a pretty decent bottle of champagne chilling in the fridge. And I brought home a box of petit fours from the bakery across the street from my office. I’ll be back as soon as possible. But this’ll definitely take a while.”

  Pete shook his head. “Actually, what I really want is some sleep. I feel rode hard and put away wet, know what I mean?”

  She kissed him. “Do you want anything? I’ve got Xanax, Ambien, Restoril. Helpful for stressed nerves. You still feel wound up.”