Circe (25 page)

“What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just really afraid, Eric. I’ve never been so afraid. I believe in the devil. I believe in ghosts. I mean, I’ve seen them in movies. I saw the exorcist, but I don’t know what is going on and I don’t want to face what is going on. Andy is dead and I can’t believe it was a suicide. I have to leave.”

“And go where?”

“I’m going home, to Florida, and I’m taking Angela with me. I’ll repeat my internship next year.”

“Just like that.”

“I think you should go too. I mean, whether or not we are just crazy, whether or not any of this is real. Cassie is real and this case is going to be all over the media and Andy is real and she died. This internship is over. I mean, we don’t even know if this place is going to be APA accredited when we graduate in four months.”

“Fair enough.”

“What about you?”

“I need to finish this internship. Pria has already quit her job. She needs me to make money next year. She needs me to be a father. I can’t leave, plus, it’s too late for me in any case, right?”

“You should leave too.”

“You know I can’t. Pria is sick. She can hardly work now. She’s used all her sick days for the next year.”

We walked slowly to the car. The fog seemed to rise out of the earth instead of descending from the sky. It crept over the ground kissing our feet and surrounding us with a sense of doom that felt more than appropriate. I found myself wishing I could take Pria and run away. I dreaded walking back through the gates into that hell. I wanted to take Pria and drive back to the cold and steam of Detroit. I longed for the old smells and the noise that Pria detested. There was no supernatural world there, only muggers and rapists and the half-crazed seeking solace in Zyprexa. That is the way it should be. I missed fear of the tangible.

I tried to imagine a way to go back. I tried to imagine a job that would take me with an incomplete internship or a state that would give me a license, but there was no place. I had to finish what I started or I would never be able to take care of my babies.. I had been selfish all of my life. I’d taken what I wanted without regret. I’d used people up and spit them out. I’d been a hunter, searching for solace in the flesh of the lost. I had broken people to fill my own void. I was tired of being selfish. If I was damned, so be it, but I wasn’t going to take Pria away from her home again. I wasn’t going to make her work because I was afraid. I was going to do the right thing. I spat on the ground. I spat on the damp earth of Circe. My fate wouldn’t be dictated by something I couldn’t see or touch.

Pria was soaking in the bathtub when I got home. The bathroom was filled with candles. She smiled at me over her round belly. She had left work early again; it was only 3:00 p.m. I sat down on the toilet next to the tub and rubbed her shoulders, staring at her growing breasts. She put her hand on my leg. The light cast odd shadows on her face, augmenting her bones and the shadows beneath her eyes. She appeared to be more of a wraith than a woman.

“You’re home early,” she said.

“It seems that the ghosts have risen up to avenge Cassie,” I said in a bad attempt at a joke.

Pria laughed. “What? Have you been watching horror movies again?”

“I wish. Andy is dead.”

Pria turned to look at me. “Are you serious?”

“She killed herself.”

“Oh, God.”

She stood up and dried off. She threw on her track suit and disappeared into the living room. She stood in front of the window looking into the gloom of our back yard. I drained and cleaned the tub for her. After, I followed her into the living room and stood in front of the window with her.

“We are cursed,” she said.

“Maybe.”

“How do we fight what we can’t see? Is it her? Should we kill her? Should we curse her? If we kill Cassie, will it stop?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is it that place? If we burn it, will it go away?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we go to church? Should we pray?”

“I don’t know.”

“
I will not go quietly into this night
.”

“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.