Mirror Maze j-4

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Mirror Maze j-4 Page 16

by William Bayer


  "There, Frank?" Sarah's voice grated against his ear, still ringing from the explosion.

  "I'm still here."

  "What's going on?"

  "You want to know what's going on?" :'Is it a secret?" She snickered.

  "No, it's not a secret." He felt himself growing furious, at her and at the world.

  "So, what is it?"

  "They've just blown up my fucking car, that's what the fuck it is! "

  After he hung up, he shouted the phrase again: "They've blown up my fucking car!"

  It was only later, when he'd gotten over his anger and incredulity, that he asked himself just whom he'd meant by they.

  The Riddle!

  There were times when, staring into mirrors, she felt herself empowered.

  At other times, mirror-madness times, she felt as though mirrors were sucking out her strength, her very life itself… At first she didn't notice. She was lying in bed reading the latest issue of ARTnews with the TV set on across the room. As usual, she had the sound turned down so that the flickering television was little more than a barely audible presence. She probably would have missed the story entirely if she hadn't happened to look up just as a still photo of her latest mark filled the screen. She nearly choked when she saw it.

  She sat up, grabbed her remote, thumbed down hard on the volume control, then clicked her VCR on to record. An attractive young Asian woman was talking to a tall, tired looking man in front of the Savoy. They were talking about Phil Dietz. From the gist of their conversation, Gelsey understood that Dietz had been murdered in his room.

  She watched spellbound. The tired man was a detective; the Asian woman was a journalist. The detective was middle-aged, and had searching eyes with bags beneath them and a well-sculpted chin. He also displayed a world weary manner that she associated with certain French film stars of the 1940s. The reporter asked sharp, aggressive questions to which the detective responded with patient, noncommittal answers. And then they started talking about her: . a redheaded woman in the downstairs lounge… a mystery redhead seen with Philip Dietz just before he was killed… "

  After the segment was over, she rewound the tape and watched it again.

  What was going on?

  She got out of bed, pulled on her clothes, began to pace the loft. If Dietz had been stabbed with, say, a pair of scissors, she might have cause to worry that she'd done the deed, perhaps in the amnesic dream-sister trance-state into which she sometimes slipped after taking down a mark.

  But she distinctly remembered hearing Dietz snore when she wished him sweet dreams from his door. So, whatever had happened to him had occurred after she'd left the room. She had left it neat, too-she remembered that. Yet the reporter had referred to it as "ransacked."

  That meant that someone had gone into it after she had left. Which meant, again, that whatever had happened to Dietz had had nothing whatever to do with her.

  Except… They were looking for her now. The detective's searching eyes told her he was a hunter. She knew the sort of man: quiet, sometimes gentle, but relentless in pursuit. He was a hunter and she was his quarry.

  Another thing she knew about him: He was serious-he was no Leering Man.

  That night she didn't sleep. She had a painting to finish, her latest version of Leering Man-and this time she was determined to get him right.

  At three in the morning, still haunted by Dietz, she thought of a way to put him out of her mind. She went to the drawer in which she stashed the loot she took off marks, pulled out the gizmo she'd found inside Dietz's money belt and brought it over to her workbench.

  She centered it carefully, picked up a steel ball hammer, raised it above the object, then brought it down with all her might.

  The object jumped but didn't break.

  She hammered at it several more times, but to no avail. Determined to destroy it, she set it lengthwise in her steel vise, then screwed the jaws closed. It buckled beneath the pressure. The transparent material, some sort of resin or plastic, split apart and fine metal tracing broke out. After that, by a combination of hammering and crushing, she was able to reduce it to irregular jagged pieces, which she added with glue to the other debris attached to the ground around Leering Man's face, and then covered with thick gushes of paint applied directly with a palette knife.

  At dawn, exhausted but satisfied, she flung off her clothes, crawled into her bed, pulled the covers over her head and fell asleep.

  Three days later she sat nervously in Dr. Zimmerman's office wondering what he was going to say. She had just delivered her confession. She was, she had just admitted, a species of poisoner, a thief and, worse, a destroyer of men's egos. Now she gazed at the empty eye holes in the masks on Dr. Z's wall and imagined eyes slowly appearing in them-twenty pairs of eyes that would glare at her in moral judgment until she bowed her head in shame.

  "So… Dr. Zimmerman's soothing voice cut through her reverie. She tightened her elbows against her sides, fearful of his indignation.

  "So… perhaps," he continued, "now you would like to tell me a little bit about ''?"

  Is that what he wants now? God!

  "Sure, Doc," she said in her best tough-girl voice, pleased at least that he had not condemned her. "What can I tell you?"

  "Whatever you want, Gelsey," he answered kindly.

  "And if you prefer not to talk about it-that will be all right, too."

  What a gracious man. He deserves something nice, anything for sparing me a sermon. And his question relieved her of having to discuss her fear of being connected to the Dietz murder-a fear that had filled her life the past three days, ever since she'd seen the report on TV, "Playtime," she said, "-it's not all that unusual from what I've heard.

  My father… well, you know… he'd make suggestions. And then we'd go down to the maze." She stared at the masks again. The eyes were gone from the eye holes.

  She felt alone.

  She continued: "We'd never enter through the outside door. We'd always descend to it from the loft-open the trapdoor, climb down the ladder to the catwalks, then shinny down the rope to the floor."

  "Then?"

  "Then… you know, we'd do it. Play."

  "That was his word for it?"

  " ',' '." That's what he always called it. Like: ', honey bunch-it's a rainy day. Let's go down the rope and play."

  "He called you ' bunch'?"

  More questions! Why can't he just leave it alone? "That and 'sweetheart." Sometimes '." Lots of different things." She smiled, a forced little smile. "Affectionate names."

  "And then?"

  "Then what?"

  "What would he do?"

  She glared at him sharply. "Christ, Doc! What the hell do you think?"

  She was sweating, she realized. Her armpits were wet. But not her crotch. That part of her, she noted with grim satisfaction, was bone-dry.

  She turned to Dr. Z. Was he titillated by all this? Was there an erection sprouting in his baggy trousers? She didn't look. Better, she decided, not to know. Her thoughts turned to the tired detective she'd seen interviewed on TV, the detective with the searching eyes. The hunter. Her enemy.

  "You're angry with me now," Dr. Zimmerman said.

  "Yes," she agreed, "a little."

  "I think more than a little, Gelsey."

  "What do you want me to do? Describe it to you blow-by-blow?" "Were there blows?" he asked gently.

  "No!" Now she was angry. "He was sweet about it. Really sweet.

  That's what's so maddening. He was tender. He didn't throw me on the floor and… force himself. He always tried to make it..

  "What?" "Fun," she said.

  She turned to face him. Dr. Z was stretched out in his chair, eyes half-closed, the point of his goatee aimed straight at his shoes.

  Perhaps he was trying to imagine what she was describing, not only to visualize it but so he could feel it as well. Perhaps he was being careful not to look at her, out of consideration, so she wouldn't feel ashamed.

 
"It was mostly with our hands anyway," she said. "We didn't do, you know … the whole thing. He wasn't a beast. He never did anything that hurt me."

  "But he did hurt you."

  "Yes," she agreed, "he did."

  "Did he-?"

  She interrupted. "He always wanted me to ask for it. Ask him to do this or that. Whatever. He wouldn't do it unless I asked."

  "Did you?" "I asked." It pained her terribly to say it. "I don't know why. I guess I felt I had to. That was part of the game, you see. I would ask and then he'd grant my wish." She paused. "I think I know why he did it that way."

  "Why do you think?"

  "If I asked for it, that would mean he wasn't doing any thing wrong.

  Against my will, you know. It wasn't abuse. It wasn't forced. It was… by consent."

  "How does that make you feel?"

  "The same way it made me feel then." She knew that very soon she was going to cry.

  "Which was?"

  "That I really did ask for it. So I had it coming to me, didn't I?"

  The tears were welling. "I wish you could understand. It wasn't all that … bad. It really didn't hurt. It was really sweet.

  Afterwards I would feel as though I had dreamed it, you know. Like it hadn't really happened. The mirrors made it seem like that. I would watch what we were doing in the mirrors, and it would seem like I was watching other people. Maybe that's why he always wanted to play down there. So I could sort of… float away… "

  The tears were streaming down her face now. It felt good to cry, so she didn't bother to wipe them even when Dr. Z offered her a box of tissues.

  Crying was better than feeling afraid.

  "… float away from it, into mirror space. It's another land, Doc.

  Everything's the opposite there. Right is left and vice versa. It wasn't me anymore. It was… the other girl."

  "Your twin, your shadow."

  "My dream-sister who lives inside the glass." Gelsey snatched up a tissue, wiped her face. "There wasn't just one of her either. There were hundreds. In that particular room-he called it the Great Hall of Infinite Deceptions there were more images than you could count.

  Galleries of reflections extending in every direction, each one infinitely long. Of course not infinite. There isn't enough light for that and the mirrors can never be perfectly aligned, so the corridors tend to curve and eventually you lose the image. But you know they're there, continuing forever around the bend. That's the point, that they can go on forever." She turned to him. "It's hard to explain." "I think you explain it very well." Dr. Zimmerman paused. "But I don't think it was all fun and games." "I never said it was!"

  "Did he?"

  She nodded. "That was the idea, I guess." She paused. "There's something I never told you." She wiped away more tears, then tried to smile.

  There're so many things I never told you until today. And other things I probably won't tell you ever. "I sometimes thought I saw something else down there with us-amidst all the images, a creature's face. I'd catch just a flash of it and then it'd disappear.

  When I'd ask Dad about it, he'd laugh and say it was just the Minotaur."

  "Minotaur-interesting. Was it real? Was someone really there?"

  "I guess not. But it seemed so at the time. It scared me. Then this… creature would just disappear, and Dad would comfort me, and then I'd forget."

  Dr. Z stroked his little pointed beard. It was getting toward the end of the hour. Gelsey stared at him, waiting to hear what he had to say.

  Perhaps he sensed that the time had come to venture an analysis, for he clasped his hands together, a sign that he was going to sum up.

  She hoped he wouldn't talk about "shadow-work" and "eating your shadow" again. She needed more than that, something to make her feel less miserable about herself on account of the awful things she did to men.

  "You believe you turned to the mirrors to escape the reality of what he was doing to you. But I wonder if there was another reason," Dr. Z said.

  "I wonder if you used the mirrors, mirror space as you call it, as a kind of stage to which you could turn and then watch the two of you perform.

  "Perform?"

  Dr. Z nodded. "Certainly turning to the mirrors was a way to disassociate yourself. It wasn't happening to you, it was happening to your dream-sister in the world of mirrors. With that fantasy you protected yourself from the pain of your father's betrayal and abuse.

  But I believe there was You were as much attracted to what he was doing as repelled. This is not unnatural. We often find it in incest cases.

  Your father was initiating you into a realm of arcane knowledge, the secret sexual knowledge of adults. You had to be fascinated. You were only twelve but already a sexual being. We know that children much younger than that can have extremely powerful sexual feelings. The point is-you watched. And not just one reflection either. A hundred reflections, a million… images reflected down those infinitely long mirrored corridors. You watched and you imagined and you dreamed that all this was happening to your twin. The mirrors were a theater and you were the audience. Oh, yes, you turned away from him. But you might have chosen to close your eyes. You did not close them. You chose to watch.

  That choice was yours." Dr. Zimmerman paused.

  "I don't condone your criminal acts, Gelsey. But perhaps I can help you understand them. With understanding, hope- fully, you will stop.

  It would be easy to say they are simply acts of vengeance visited by you upon lecherous men, stand-ins for your perverted father, a man you both hated and adored. It would be easy to say that you always go down to the maze first in order to become your mirror-twin, thus making it possible to do these awful things without guilt or loss of self-respect.

  Your father made you ' for it'; you are so seductive that these men must ' for it,' too. Your father abused you on rainy days; you feel compelled to do these things on rainy nights. There are other parallels and they are all so clear that I am… just a little bit suspicious. The unconscious does not act with such precision. I believe there is another level of meaning hidden beneath this much-too-regular symmetry. Our task is to find it. I'm not certain yet, but I believe the key lies in the maze. I believe there is more down there than you're telling me, more than you may know yourself This Minotaur, for instance. Who or what is it? Who or what does it represent? You look at yourself in mirrors all the time. Now I think you must ask yourself what exactly you are looking for. To put it another way, you must learn to look beyond your own reflection to something deeper, hidden, perhaps behind the mirrors.

  Then, I believe, you will see your real self." He paused. He was looking at the little clock across the room, the clock that told him when a session was finished without his having to glance too obviously at his watch.

  "Time is up. You know that as a therapist I don't pass judgment on my patients. But I'd be remiss if I didn't say something to you now-speaking as one most concerned about your welfare. I feel I know you well, Gelsey. I know you have good character. The terrible thing about compulsions is the way they force us to do things we know are wrong. You have a strong moral compass. So, please, my dear-I urge you with all my heart-please follow it."

  He stood to signal the session was over. His parting words at the door were simple: "I believe we will look back on this session as having been very important for us both. Next time we will explore the Minotaur-who or what you think you saw in the maze. Perhaps that imaginary creature is the key to your locked-up memories."

  When she left, the tears were back in her eyes. They clouded her vision even on the street. Dr. Zimmerman was a wonderful man. She was so fortunate to have found him. He had called her "my dear." He had urged her to be good with all my heart." With such words he had given her a gift to carry through the week. He had given her, she felt, a big dose of love.

  The Erica Hawkins Gallery occupied the sixth floor of a renovated loft building near Spring Street on lower Broadway. The building was not in the geographical center of
the downtown gallery district, but close enough to justify its aura of self-importance-thick glass doors; austere all white lobby; uniformed security guard; pair of shiny steel freight elevators.

  As Gelsey rode up in one that Tuesday morning, the names of the various establishments on the various floors were automatically lit in turn:

  Icarus Arts; Sofie Winter Gallery; Jeremiah Bones Art Books; Tannhauser Gallery; 1. 1. Sing; and, at the top, Erica Hawkins.

  The elevator door opened directly onto the gallery floor, where Erica and her young assistants, Dakota Hutchins and Justin Barrett, were busy arranging sculptures for an exhibition. A willowy young woman, nearly six feet tall, wearing dark glasses and dressed in tight black leather pants and a black T-shirt overlaid with a black leather vest, stood to one side watching. Gelsey recognized her as Jodie Graves, the artist whose work was being mounted.

  "Gelsey!"

  Erica came toward her, arms wide to embrace. She was a large, rotund, gray-haired woman with a booming voice and a maternal smile. Impossible, Gelsey thought, to discern Erica's character from her looks. The gallery owner, for all her fostering of young artists, was a steel-hard businesswoman and a militant, occasionally raging radical feminist.

  Erica wrapped her arms around Gelsey and squeezed her to her bosom.

  "The new painting-I adore it!" She whispered in Gelsey's ear: "If I don't flatter Jodie a little more she'll go into a snit. Wait in my office. Be with you in a flash."

  Dakota and Justin waved and there was a curt nod of acknowledgment from Jodie, the kind of nod an athlete might give a rival before a race.

  Gelsey glanced at Jodie's sculptures: commercial-store mannequins tortured into erotic positions, wrapped tightly in overlapping irregularly shaped pieces of black leather, the wrappings secured to the forms with chrome rivets.

  "Nice," Gelsey said, smiling sweetly.

  Jodie Graves turned away. Nice was the last word she wanted to hear; disturbing or even trashy would have been more happily received. But Gelsey would not give her that satisfaction. I've been there, she thought, taken the risks, 7 breathed the danger and the lust. The feelings Jodie goes for haven't been earned In Erica's office she found her latest Leering Man hanging opposite the desk. She stood back from it, tried to see it fresh rather than as a work she had struggled with day and night through the preceding week.

 

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