Ellen Datlow - Alien Sex

He ate lunch with Veronica and the poet. Thomas was talking, as usual, about Divine Inspiration. Not just any old Divine Inspiration, but rather that Divine Inspiration (something here about “the force that through the green fuse,” which St. Jacques was sure he had stolen) that enabled Russell Thomas to write his paeans of praise and thanksgiving.

St. Jacques detested him, but thought that this once it couldn’t hurt to be seen in his company. Unfortunately, Mother Isobel never put in an appearance, so it was a wasted effort.

Thomas’s monologue left St. Jacques free to worry about what, he finally realized with a certain surprise, was an ethical question. The vulnerable look on Marcia’s face had awakened him to the fact that what he was contemplating was perhaps more a sort of rape than it was the consequenceless, if scandalous, series of aventures he’d been contemplating.

Though perhaps it would be better to picture the whole thing as a kind of irresistible seduction. There was no force involved; the Marcia of the night before had been willing; it was only her reawakened self who’d been troubled. And that perhaps more because of the interpretations Mother Isobel had put on her experience than because of anything inherent in the experience itself. Or, at least, in what had happened when it had been just the two of them, before St. Jacques’s own fears and self-censorship had brought the avenging nun into the scenario.

He’d done nothing to harm Marcia by involving her in his sexual fantasies: her own unconscious must be serving her up similar fantasies constantly. What he’d done wrong was fail to protect her from her subsequent memory of what happened: he had to find a way to censor what she remembered on awakening so as to ensure that she was no more troubled by her memories of his erotic scenarios than she would have been by the memory of one of her own.

Maybe all he’d have to do would be to tell the girls to forget everything that happened, then let their own unconscious censoring mechanisms do the work for him. The same way hypnotized people could be told to forget they’d even been hypnotized.

The faculty meeting was short and pointless. As it was breaking up, Mother Isobel asked some of the faculty members to stay behind, but there was nothing to indicate that St. Jacques was the one she was interested in. All she did was tell him she wanted to see him in her office after her last class, then dismissed him.

He was thankful she hadn’t attacked or ridiculed him in public, furious at himself for his gratitude, since he knew her well enough to know she never did anything for anybody without expecting something back in return.

Sixth period was a study hall. Most of the girls had been excused to work on the Mother-Daughter Fashion Show. St. Jacques divided his time between rereading The Interpretation of Dreams and surreptitiously watching Liz, a compact, heavy-breasted but athletic blonde he’d had in class the year before; in a few years she’d probably be getting fat, but for the moment she was supremely sensual.

He’d just reread the passage in which Freud relates how he’d told the “intelligent lady patient” that “You know the stimulus of a dream always lies among the experiences of the preceding day.” St. Jacques wanted to make sure he was primed with all the proper stimuli for the night to come.

The bell rang. Liz jumped up, grabbed her books, and ran. St. Jacques watched the play of her buttocks and thighs beneath her slightly too-tight plaid uniform skirt, then picked up his own books and made his way to his seventh-period class.

Seventh period was French I. Terri handed him a note signed by Mother Isobel herself excusing Marcia from class indefinitely for reasons of health. St. Jacques couldn’t tell if Terri, June, or any of the others remembered their brief participation in his dream-scenario.

In any case, he did his best to make the class a perfect example of classic enlightened pedagogic method as practiced at St. Bernadette’s: he started out asking the girls difficult questions about the imparfait du subjonctif that he knew they couldn’t answer, was abusively critical of their answers, tried even trickier questions about the accord du participe passé that no one volunteered to answer, then sent Terri and June and two other girls to do them on the board. Since none of them proved capable of getting the problems right, he gave the class a spur-of-the-moment quiz, as well as a long homework assignment for the next day. This gave him a good half hour to watch and fantasize about them uninterrupted while pretending to busy himself with other matters.

June was having trouble with the quiz. On impulse, he decided to go easy on the grading this once.

His final class he spent going over the tests he’d graded that morning. None of the girls in the class interested him, though some had attracted him strongly in previous years. As he’d gotten older, his fantasy life had become increasingly detached from any real-world possibilities and involvements and the girls he desired had become younger and younger, so that it was the incoming thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds who excited him most, the seniors far less, the other adults he encountered almost not at all. Knowing his fantasies to be impossible, he’d never felt compelled to realize them, or blame himself for not having done so. A perfect example of his unconscious mind arranging things for his ease and comfort.

Mother Isobel was waiting for him in her office. The Malleus Maleficarum and various other leather- and cloth-bound books were stacked on her desk.

A stage setting. She probably hadn’t even opened any of the books, just stuck them where they’d look impressive.

“Sit down, Lawrence.”

He sat.

“You know what I called you in here to talk about.”

“Not really. I—”

“Of course you do. You were in the chapel, even if you slept through the first half of what I said.”

“Mother Isobel, I’m not a Catholic, I don’t believe—”

“You’re always trying to find an excuse, Lawrence. Make people believe what you’ve done isn’t really wrong after all, so you can come up smelling like a rose. You’ve been here more than ten years, and that’s been long enough for me to learn how you lie to yourself and everybody else. But you were married in a Catholic church, by a Catholic priest, to a Catholic wife, and this is a Catholic school. So if you really don’t know what I’m talking about, why don’t you tell me where you got that bruise on your face and those bumps on your head?”

“Please, Mother Isobel… I had some kind of nightmare last night, I don’t know what exactly, but I must’ve hit my head thrashing around—”

“Quit lying! You remember as well as I do. There’re just three reasons I haven’t fired you yet. One, you’re Veronica’s husband; if I fire you I’ll probably have to let her go, and she deserves better than that. Two, the Sisters of Sanctimony haven’t yet been given official approval by the Church—we’re still in a probationary period—and I’d rather not complicate matters any more than necessary, especially with something as controversial as demonic possession. Three, I think what’s wrong with you is more basic spinelessness than out-and-out evil. I watched you carefully during the exorcism, and even though you squirmed a lot—”

“Because of the way you were glaring at me!”

“—still, you didn’t seem to be in any real torment. Sinistrari distinguishes between those persons who are visited by incubi and succubi through no fault of their own, and the witches and sorcerers who receive such visitations as the result of pacts signed with demons. My guess is you’re one of the first kind. Along for the ride, as it were. I’m assuming you haven’t signed any sort of pact—”