Pascal Scott
WHEN I WAS young and still believed that people can change, I took a job in a clinic for substance abusers called New Hope. I was the first person the New Hopefuls saw when they walked in the front door with their court-ordered referrals in their shaky hands; I did intake, which is just another way of saying I got the dirt on them before I turned them over to the counselors.
There were nineteen therapists at the clinic—thirteen middle-aged women and six middle-aged men—and they had all been addicts of one kind or another in their prime. With most it had been booze but with some it had been drugs—meth or coke, smack or ludes. Their substance of choice didn’t really matter, they told me; what mattered now was that they were clean and sober;they were working the steps and making amends and reaching out to their fellow alcoholics, their sister drug addicts. I nodded and told them they were right about that, but when I went home at the end of the day I drank my wine and tried to forget all the stories I’d heard at New Hope.
I was paid eight dollars an hour for a forty-hour week, and when I finished with house payments and bills and my student loans, I had just enough money left over for staples. There was a bakery next door where I could buy a day-old loaf of French bread for fifty cents; next door to the bakery a liquor store stocked whiskey and beer and cheap wine. My habit was Poseur Chardonnay, an off-label brand I’d discovered on a lower shelf. At two dollars a bottle, I could rationalize a purchase three or four times a week.
New Hope was run by a tall, white-haired psychiatrist whose perfect manners and paternal air had impressed me during my two-hour job interview. But as the counselors would later remind me, things are often not what they seem. Dr. Jonathan Hillman—he insisted we use his full title—suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a diagnosis confided to me by Manuel Luna, the clinic’s only bilingual counselor.
“Chica,” he said, his pet name for all females under thirty—of the staff that meant only me but, of course, there were his clients—“Dr. Hillman is classic.”
He opened a thick, blue book, the most recent Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, flipping pages as he spoke. “Jonathan Hillman is the classic definition. He fits all the criteria. Listen to this:
1) Inflated self image.
2) Exploitative.
3) Insouciant temperament.
Manuel looked up from the page. “Insouciant means he doesn’t care,” he said.
“I know,” I replied.
He cocked his head and came conspiratorially close to where I sat at my desk. He moved easily, like a dancer, like a much younger man.
“I was an English major,” I explained. “Minor in Psychology.”
“I’m impressed.” He continued reading.
4) Cognitive expansiveness.
5) Deficient social conscience.
“That’s Jonathan,” he concluded. “A walking personality disorder.”
I shrugged. “Who said ‘We’re all crazy here’?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sounds smart.” He gave me his flirtatious, signature-Manuel smile—the one that worked on most of the women and some of the men. “Maybe I did,” he said.
IN THOSE DAYS—the year was 1978—I lived a short drive from New Hope in a trailer park that abutted The Blessed Mother Cemetery in Colma, population 1,002. Back then The Blessed Mother was one of Colma’s eleven places of final rest. The town’s many cemeteries—nine human and two pet—had earned it a place in the Guinness Book of Records. The joke locally was that there were more dead people in Colma than living, which was ridiculously true. After I had moved into my double-wide, I put a bumper sticker on my truck that read, “It’s good to be alive in Colma.”
At twenty-eight I didn’t mind living next door to a cemetery. At that point in my life I was completely unacquainted with death, and the real estate of the dead held a dark appeal for me. A cemetery seemed like a good place to go when the world closed in, and I sometimes walked the grounds at dusk. I found a preternatural calm at that hour, and if there were indeed ghosts among the headstones, I felt somehow comforted by that notion and not at all disturbed by their presence.
ONE SUMMER MORNING, a girl drifted into the clinic on a mist, or so it seemed. New Hope was located in Pacifica, a foggy beach town that lingered like an afterthought between the business centers of San Francisco to the north and San Jose to the south. The cemeteries and lone trailer park of Colma sat about ten miles to the east. To the west there was nothing but the gray-blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean.
The town had been built by old San Francisco money, and the beach cottages that once provided a weekend escape to bankers and socialites and compromised judges were now mortgaged as primary residences to blue-collar workers who struggled to make their payments. The apartment buildings had come later and with them the tatters at the end of the middle class: renters who worked for the county, the school district, or the clinic where drunks went when it was time to sober up.
That morning it had been misty since dawn, and when she walked in, the girl seemed to bring the atmosphere in with her. I checked her out; I couldn’t help myself. She didn’t look like one of our usual clients with their beaten-down expressions and bloodshot eyes. She looked, well, different wasn’t quite the right adjective. Unique, maybe. This was the seventies, and Gothic was a word rarely used outside American Literature classes. But here she was in front of me: Goth before there was Goth. She was dressed entirely in black—unusual itself in a beach town—and the black of her dress matched the black of her hair, which was long and shiny and pulled back with a black ribbon. Her eyes, made wide with eyeliner, were the color of seaweed. Her lips were blood-red. Her skin was so pale it seemed almost translucent. She was stunning.
I realized with something like a small electric shock that I had not had a date in longer than I could remember. My last girlfriend had left me abruptly after persuading me to move from my hometown in Westwood—where we had both attended UCLA—to her hometown in S.F. Almost as soon as we’d arrived, she’d taken up with a lover from high school, and that was that. I’d lived in Victorians in the Mission with a brood of mismatched roommates until I’d saved enough for a down payment on the mobile home. It occurred to me now that I hadn’t dated in months, or maybe it had been years. I’d been celibate for so long I’d lost track.
I opened a manila folder and began filling in the intake form.
“Name?” Jag ärhon.
That sounded vaguely Nordic to me. Funny, you don’t look Nordic. Bet it wasn’t the name her mother gave her.
“Address and phone number?” She gave the address of a sketchy apartment complex up the hill, rumored by the counselors to be a shooting gallery. Not safe. But maybe she liked not safe.
“Birthdate?” She was twenty-one. A baby.
Then the question they all hated. “And what brings you to the clinic today, Ms. ärhon?”
She pulled a piece of paper from a leather clutch, unfolded it, and pushed it across my desk. Ah, the Court Referral.I had been at New Hope only a few months and already I’d seen the Court Referral a hundred times. The letterhead told me it was from the Superior Court of California, County of San Mateo County; that Jag ärhon was the defendant; and that she had been convicted of the misdemeanor of Driving Under the Influence with a point thirteen blood alcohol. Ouch. Under Disposition Information I read:
Summary probation for five years. One hundred and eighty days confinement. Confinement suspended. One hundred dollar fine, alcohol related program for first offenders, license restricted for ninety days.
Bad girl. “Anything else we should know?” I asked.
“I’m a drag,” she said. Only it didn’t sound like “drag.” She drew it out so that it sounded like “drao-ga.”
I laughed and closed the folder. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I said. She didn’t react, not even a smile. No sense of humor. Okay, maybe she is Nordic.
“A counselor will be with you in a few minutes. You can wait over there.” I nodded toward the padded folding chairs by the front windows. The mist hadn’t lifted, even though it was now late in the morning. Instead, it seemed to be hovering outside, almost as if it were waiting for something.
Jag got up then in the most peculiar manner. She didn’t really stand up; it was more as if she floated up. Then she glided toward a chair to wait.
I literally shook my head. Weird. I looked around, but no one seemed to have noticed. I walked the folder over to Brad, an aging surfer-boy type. He glanced up from his paperwork and frowned. Sobriety didn’t agree with Brad. He’d gotten his ten-year chip just a week before, but I could tell he was one of those dry drunks who would give anything to be able to hit the tequila one more time.
“She’s waiting,” I said. He flipped open Jag’s file and skimmed it.
“Thanks,” he said, not looking up.
I went back to my desk, trying to ignore the long-forgotten sensation starting between my thighs. I glanced at the girl. She had her head down, looking at an AA pamphlet she’d pulled from a display rack. Oh yeah, I thought, I remember.
MY DOUBLE-WIDE SAT in the far northeast corner of the park on an odd-shaped lot that accommodated the boundary between the residential zone of what management called my “mobile home community” and the commercial zone of The Blessed Mother Cemetery. The home’s previous owner had built raised beds in the V of the twenty-by-twenty-by-thirty patch next to my unit and had planted rose bushes in the amended soil. The evening after I’d met Jag, I decided against my usual walk through The Blessed Mother and worked, instead, in the garden. I had checked out a book from the County Library—this was decades before the Internet—and had learned the types of plantings I had found there: Floribunda, Hybrid Tea, Climbing, Shrub, and Miniature. There was a kind of poetry to roses, I discovered, even in their names: Wildflower and William Shakespeare, Peter Pan and Pearl Drift, Mermaid and Magic Carpet, Claret and Tequila Sunrise.
That evening I pruned and weeded and cut a single, long-stemmed American Beauty. Inside, I ran fresh water from the kitchen faucet and filled an empty wine bottle. I slipped in the rose and took it to my room. Across from my bed on a thrift-store chest of drawers I set the makeshift vase. The rose was the last thing I saw before I turned out the light.
I usually sleep well, but that night I lay awake thinking about Jag. Uncontrollably, my thoughts obsessed about her skin. It was so—white. White as the foam of a crashing wave. White as the silk lining of a casket. Images flooded my brain. I pictured her white skin and imagined my tongue on her neck, gliding up under her chin, coming to rest on her mouth. That luscious, red mouth. Beneath my hips the sheets grew damp. I slid my hand between my legs and began stroking. It had been a long time. A few moments later I came in a spasm of release. My back arched and then relaxed, and I fell into a dark sleep.
I dreamed, and in the dream I was moving through a watery shadowland. The shadows were gray and green in color and seemed to exist in some bottomless, fluid space. I could hear myself breathing, but what I breathed in did not feel like air. I was breathing the liquid itself. It was as if my lungs were drawing oxygen from the water. I became aware next of my heart, which was beating as if it were flying through a tunnel, through a passageway constructed of bones.
Ahead I saw something luminescent. This unidentifiable, shining thing was a deep shade of blue except at the center, where it glowed with a white light. It, too, seemed to be liquid or nearly so, like a jellyfish. It swayed lightly where it hung suspended as if responding to some movement of water or air.
The jellyfish-like creature floated toward me and when it was within inches of my face, it metamorphosed into a seal. Yes, it was a seal now, black and slick with huge, plaintive eyes. As I watched, the eyes widened and turned seaweed-green. I blinked, and when I looked again, the seal had transformed once more and was now a familiarly beautiful girl. “Mine,” she said loud enough to wake me.
I sat up like Lazarus. My heart was racing, my breath coming in shallow gasps. The sheets had sweat-soaked through to the mattress. I fumbled with the switch on my nightstand lamp. The light seemed extraordinarily bright. I lowered the lids of my eyes to let my pupils adjust. When I opened them wide, they came to rest on the vase across the room. I saw that sometime during the night, the American Beauty had died. Inexplicably, next to it there was a second rose, a rose so darkly red it was nearly black. I didn’t recognize it at all and had no memory of placing it there. Confused and questioning my sanity, I pulled the library book from the nightstand and searched the pages until I found a picture that matched. I read:
One of the deepest, darkest red roses grown, its large velvety head opens into a captivating star-shaped bloom. The Black Magic Rose.
I looked again at Black Magic and my dead American Beauty. I closed the book, turned out the light, and lay down. Maybe I was still dreaming. That must be it. In the morning everything would be back to normal.
And it was. When light broke in through my bedroom window, my room was just as it had been the evening before. The American Beauty Rose bloomed in the wine bottle. There was no Black Magic. It had been a dream.
AS PART OF their program, first offenders were required to attend AA meetings. “Ninety meetings in ninety days,” the counselors told them. In the Bay Area there were so many recovering alcoholics that there were designated meetings for just about everyone’s preference: men, women, youth; lesbian, gay, transgender; En Español; Deaf, wheelchair accessible; smokers. You could find a lesbian-only meeting any day of the week. One of these was held at New Hope. A few minutes before five every Friday evening, between twenty and thirty dykes would come through our front door, heading for the back room. The first Friday after I’d done her intake, Jag joined them. I hadn’t been sure, but now it was confirmed.
Although that didn’t mean much. Other than her intake stats, I didn’t know anything about her. Maybe she had a girlfriend. Maybe she was a serial killer. I wasn’t sure which of those prospects was more disturbing. There was a rule at the clinic against dating clients, of course, but that was written specifically for counselors. I was just the receptionist so, technically, it didn’t apply to me. Even so, my conscience told me it would be wrong to hit on Jag. My body told me something else. I decided to listen to my body. I just wouldn’t tell anyone, especially not the counselors. Therapists were notorious gossips, I’d learned, and if I told one, it would be all over New Hope and eventually reach Dr. Hillman.
That would mean a closed-door, one-on-one sit-down with my boss. Dr. Hillman would want to “explore” why I’d felt it necessary to violate professional standards. I’d already had one of these mandatory sessions—my indiscretion had been “laughing inappropriately.” It was Manuel who got me into trouble, naturally, telling me a bad joke and then slipping away like a lover in the night. (“How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb really has to want to change.”) I had left the thirty-five-minute-long meeting with Dr. Hillman feeling shamed and manipulated. Manuel was right. The clinic was run by a walking personality disorder, just as he’d said.
No, I’d keep Jag to myself and not tell anyone.
MY PLANS FOR a slow, romantic seduction did not execute exactly as I had expected. It seemed that Jag had plans of her own. One of my duties was balancing the books, something I felt singularly ill-equipped to do. The office manager was in charge of bookkeeping, but Dr. Hillman had assigned me the task of checking her work. Math has never been my strong suit, and when the numbers didn’t reconcile, I would stay late until they did. Like the rest of the staff, I had a key to the front door and was able to lock up when I was the last one to leave.
That happened one Friday evening. The AA dykes had drifted out, and when I looked at the clock over Dr. Hillman’s desk, I saw that its hands had somehow moved into the seven o’clock position. It was late. There was something wrong with the balance, but I couldn’t find the problem. Fuck it. I decided to deal with it on Monday, even though I knew that would cost me another sit-down with my narcissistic boss.
I closed the blinds on the front windows. I dead-bolted the door, something I was supposed to have done more than an hour ago. Dr. Hillman was extraordinarily paranoid about getting robbed, although I thought he was somewhat justified. Substance abusers are notoriously susceptible to impulsive behavior, especially regarding the financing of their habit. We had that den of druggies just up the road and, of course, there were our clients. I put the week’s revenue into the cash box, locked it, and placed it along with the ledger into the safe by Dr. Hillman’s desk.
I was the only one left in the building. As I moved toward the back, turning out desk lamps as I went, I saw what I thought was a shadow. As I neared it, the shadow stepped out of a corner of darkness.
“Jag!” I said. “Jesus! You scared the crap out of me.” And then I self-corrected, even though I was absolutely sure Jag’s mouth was less than virginal in tongue. “Sorry. You startled me.”
Amazingly, she didn’t respond. What’s with this girl?
She stared at me with those foxfire eyes. Christ. There was something not right about her, something dimly menacing.
“You need to leave,” I said.
Still nothing. Okay, fine. Be that way. You’re a damned woman of mystery. Drunks and druggies, I should have known better. She was gorgeous, but this fantasy of mine was crazy. At the same time, though, I was aware of a pulsing starting in my clit. Damn. Brain and body were at war, again.
She came at me like a storm. One second she was standing in front of me and in the next I was on my back on a counselor’s desk. And the stupidest part was what I was thinking. Which was not, why am I letting this woman fuck me like this? Or, what if Dr. Hillman comes back for some reason and walks in on us? No, it was maybe we should move to my own desk. I don’t want my juices all over somebody else’s workspace.
Because fucking was what we were doing. It wasn’t lovemaking, it wasn’t even sex. It was raw, hard, animalistic fucking, and I was flowing like a river that had been finally undammed. She pushed inside me until I swore I felt her hand up to her wrist. Her other hand went over my mouth, which was making sounds I’d never made before, cries I barely recognized as coming from me. She was stronger than I had expected and rougher. She was more than rough. She was almost violent with me. Her kisses were not kisses; they were bites. She bit my lip until I tasted blood. She ribbed open my shirt and sucked my nipples until they split. At the pain I gasped and opened my eyes. It’s hard to describe what I saw. Her expression was catlike now, as if I were her prey. I felt an energy press itself against my chest and enter me; my body rocked and bucked, and I lifted up and went into some astral plane of light and silence. It was so peaceful there, so quiet . . .
Then I was back in my body. Jag had stepped back from me. She looked at me now, and her eyes were different. They had changed again. In them I saw satisfaction, which I had expected, but I also saw sadness, which I hadn’t. I didn’t understand this girl at all.
I couldn’t move. I heard more than saw her walk to the front door and let herself out. It took me awhile to recover. I had to breathe in and out, in and out, and let the world come back. It was only then that I realized something. During the whole encounter, Jag hadn’t said a word.
ON MONDAY, SHE missed her appointment with Brad. He tried calling her number, but it had been disconnected. Jag never returned to the clinic. I resisted the impulse for a few days, but then I gave in and walked to her apartment. A bald man with a Russian accent saw me and said it was empty and was I interested in renting? I told him no, but did he happen to know what became of the girl who lived there? He didn’t. But if I saw her, she owed him money.
My life reverted to what it had been before Jag. After a while the whole incident took on the quality of a dream. As the days and then months passed into autumn, I began to wonder if it had happened at all.
But by then, the changes had started. My body soured to the smell of old milk. Sunlight hurt my eyes; air stung my lungs. A miasma of vapors seemed to follow me wherever I went. My sleep troubled with nightmares. During the day I dozed at my desk. Dr. Hillman took me to the back room to discuss the changes in my behavior. I came close to telling him to go fuck himself.
At the library I looked up my symptoms in a book on medical conditions. What I had sounded like allergies. Or asthma. Or depression. As I was setting the book in the reshelf cart, my vision focused on a volume entitled The Ancient Art of Black Magick. I don’t know why exactly, but I picked it up and flipped it open. It fell randomly to a page. On it I read:
DRAUGR. From Old Norse: draugr, plural draugar; literally “again-walker.” The draugr is an undead creature from Norse mythology.
Unlike ghosts, draugar have a corporeal body with similar physical abilities as in life. They are prone to have an appetite for food, wine, and the pleasures of the flesh. They are fluid shape-shifters, often taking the form of a seal or a cat. Draugar leave the grave to seek a victim. They can be physically and emotionally threatening to the living. They are known to cause madness in humans and animals. By infecting victims with their blood, draugar gain the ability to reproduce. A person bitten by a draugr turns into a draugr himself. Notably, a menacingly sinister cry is emitted by the victim upon the act of transmission.
I closed the book. A sick feeling had started in my stomach. I made it to the bathroom just in time. I rinsed out my mouth at the sink and looked into a cracked mirror. Draugr. I’m a draugr. She had warned me, and I had just hadn’t heard her.
THAT WINTER I discovered what had been wrong with the books. The problems hadn’t gone away; in fact, they had become more stubborn. Despite my inaptitude for accounting, I had solved the puzzle at last. Dr. Hillman was embezzling funds. That was the only explanation. Money came in from clients; Dr. Hillman used it to pay invoices he created with a little cut-and-paste, correction fluid, and the copy machine. When I put it together that way, the numbers made sense. As soon as he realized I knew, Dr. Hillman fired me. He walked me to the door without even letting me say good-bye to Manuel or Brad or anyone else.
I didn’t look for another job. I slept most of the days and wandered The Blessed Mother at night. I knew what I was searching for so that when I found it, it was more of a confirmation than a surprise. On a mossy, gray tombstone I read: “Jag ärhon. 1957-1978.” The dirt around the grave had been disturbed, and there were footprints leading away toward my trailer park.
I returned the next evening. On the grave I lay an American Beauty Rose.
IT IS SPRING now. There is something so promising about spring. The loneliness of winter ends as the first buds appear. Something in the earth comes forth. Something dormant turns green. Jag är Hon. I Am She.
This evening I pricked my finger on a thorn and bled. I’ll wait a little longer, and then I’ll start a hunt of my own. I’ll know her when I catch her scent. She may look like Jag, or she may look like me. Then again, she may look just like you.
~
Pascal Scott is the pseudonym of a Decatur, Georgia-based writer whose erotic and romantic lesbian fiction has appeared in Harrington Lesbian Literary Quarterly and In Posse Review as well as the anthologies Thunder of War, Lightning of Desire and Through the Hourglass. Her literary fiction and poetry have been published in Mississippi Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review and other journals.