Edward Lee - Succubi

“What you haven’t admitted to me is that the dream aroused you. Outwardly, you were repelled, but inwardly, you were stimulated. You were stimulated sexually. Am I right or wrong?”

Stonily, she answered, “You’re right.”

“You were aroused and you had an orgasm. Right or wrong?”

Her throat felt dry. “Right.”

She’d told him neither of these facts, yet he knew them. Somehow she suspected he knew them on her first visit three weeks ago. The man was a walking lie-detector.

“Are you experiencing an orgasmic dysfunction at home, with Martin?”

Now Ann laughed, bitterly. What difference would it make? “Yeah,” she said. “Sex has never been a problem for me. I’ve always been…orgasmic. Until now. Since I’ve been having this nightmare, I haven’t had an orgasm with Martin.”

“But you do have an orgasm in the dream?”

“Yes, every time.”

“You’re afraid that an aspect of your past will ruin your future.”

The words seemed echoed, hovering about her head. Is that what the dream meant? And if so, what aspect of her past?

Dr. Harold went on, “Do you—”

“I don’t want to talk anymore,” Ann said. “I really don’t.”

“Why?”

“I’m upset.”

“There are times when being upset is good.”

“I don’t feel very good right now.”

“You have a lot of fixations, the most paramount of which is a fear of seeming weak to others. You associate being upset with being weak. It’s not, though. In being upset, you’re releasing a part of yourself that you’ve kept hidden. That’s an essential element of effective therapy. The exposure of our fears, the release of what we keep hidden. It helps us see ourselves in such a way that we can understand ourselves. When we don’t understand ourselves, we don’t understand the world, the people around us, what we want and what we have to do—we don’t understand anything.”

I understand that I need a drink, she thought.

“I think that it’s important for you to continue coming here,” he said.

She nodded.

“One more question, then I’ll let you go for today.” Dr. Harold unconsciously stroked his mustache. “What makes you certain that you’re giving birth to Melanie in the dream? You said that you were very ill, and that you remained barely conscious for several weeks after the birth. What makes you—”

“The setting,” she said. “All I see of myself in the dream is my body. It’s almost like a movie, going from cut to cut. I never even really see myself, but I feel things and I see things around me. The cinder block walls and earthen floor—it’s the fruit cellar at my parents’ house.”

“Melanie was born in a fruit cellar?”

“Yes. There’s no hospital in Lockwood, just a resident doctor. I went into labor early, and there was a bad storm, a hurricane warning or something, so they took me down into the fruit cellar where it would be safer.”

“And this strange emblem, the one on the chalice and the larger one on the wall, was there anything in the fruit cellar that reminded you of that?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just a normal fruit cellar. My mother cans and jars her own fruits and vegetables.”

Dr. Harold pushed a pad and pencil across his big desk. “Draw the emblem for me please.”

She felt sapped, and the last thing she wanted to do was draw. Quickly, she outlined the emblem, the warped double circle on the pad.

Dr. Harold didn’t look at it when he took the pad back. “So you’re off—where is it? To Paris?”

Ann smiled genuinely for the first time. “We’re leaving tomorrow. I’ve just got a few things to wrap up at the office this afternoon, then I’m picking up the tickets. Melanie’s an art enthusiast, she’s always wanted to see the Louvre. It’ll be the first time the three of us have been away together in years.”

“I think it’s important for you to be with Martin and Melanie on a leisure basis. It’ll give you a chance to get reacquainted with yourself.”

“Maybe the dream will go away for a while,” she said, almost wistfully.

“Perhaps, but even if it doesn’t, don’t dwell on it. And we’ll talk about how you feel when you get back.”

“Okay,” she said.

“I hope you have a wonderful time. Feel free to call me if you have any problems or concerns.”

“Sure. Bye.”

Ann left the office.

«« — »»

Dr. Harold sat in silence. He closed his eyes, thinking. He thought about her. Type A, occupationally obsessive, sexually dysfunctional. Dream methodizing, he thought. The emblem she’d drawn on the pad looked scrambled, dashed. Kinesthetically, it was obvious: she’d drawn it hurriedly because it scared her. He knew that a lot of things scared Ann Slavik.

An awful lot of things.

—

Chapter 4

“So what happened?” Duke asked. “You never said.”

Erik finished his Macke cheese dog. He always ladled them with onions—the kind that came in the little tubes—to get the taste out of his mouth. Not the taste of the cheese dog, the taste of Duke.

“What happened what?” Erik asked.

“You know, your voice. How come your voice is so fucked up?”

Suddenly, he tasted memory, salt and copper. Blood. He’d tried to break away from them several times. They hadn’t liked it.

We offer you everything, Erik. And still you rebel.

That had been weeks before the police had caught him. Holy Mother of God, Chief Bard had said, staring into the pit. They all called him “Chief Lard”; he had a belly like a medicine ball. Rumor was he’d been chief of some town in Maryland; a state sting operation had caught him laundering mob money through the town bingo games at the fire hall. They’d told him he could be prosecuted or he could move on quietly. It had been Bard and Byron who’d caught Erik that night. Whatchoo doin’ with that shovel, boy? Byron had demanded. Holy Mother of God, Bard had said.

Erik knew he had been set up. They no longer trusted him.

We love you, Erik, one of them had whispered.

We want you to be good, whispered the other.

So we’re going to give you a little reminder.

So that whenever you talk, you’ll think of us.

They’d tied him down. The one had been blowing him while the other went to work on his throat. The doctor at the emergency room had said that he only had one vocal cord left. He was lucky to have lived.

“A scratch awl,” Erik finally answered Duke. “They stuck a scratch awl in my throat.”

“Christ,” Duke muttered. “Who’s they?”

“Muggers,” Erik lied. That’s what he’d told the people at the hospital and the police. That muggers had done it.

Duke picked his nose. “Bummer.”

The girl named Dawn walked in, approached the candy machine without looking at them. She’d recently made Class III status too. Duke chuckled under his breath. They’d heard Dr. Greene talking to one of the techs about her. “Katasexual,” he’d said. “Sexual obsession with a dead person.” Erik had heard that before they got her on the right medication, she would masturbate ten times a day. There were a lot of winners on the ward. The three hundred pound schizophrenic who claimed she was pregnant by her collie. “I’m going to give Dr. Greene the pick of the litter!” she’d rejoiced. One night the city police had brought in a raving PCP overdose. “I can fly anything that God can make!” he’d informed them as he strapped him into a jacket. Lots of the pats had religious fixations. Many were hypersexual yet devoutly religious, like the prostitute who was “tricking for Jesus,” or the unipolar serial killer they’d brought in from Tylersville who forced women to accept Christ as their savior and then killed them before they could change their minds. “Lotta people in heaven who wouldn’t be if it weren’t for me,” he’d bragged.