"Yeah."
"You're in Canada, at request. The police department wants you, there. You're needed."
"Yeah."
"Are you listening...?"
"Yeah, of course I am."
"You're needed in Harper Rock. Have you visited your parents, by the way?"
"Not, yet. But I'm sure they're fine. I don't..."
"Well, if you 'don't', then maybe you should just... come back. I'm sure we could find you another job, here."
"No. I'm involved with something, here."
"So you are working?"
"I'm a little side-tracked."
"If you don't work through files...."
"I know."
"Maybe you need a few weeks paid vacation? Say three. Just so you can get some stuff sorted out. I'll talk to the people, there."
"That sounds great."
"Just take a little time off, all right? It's hard. I know it's hard, especially with death, especially when somebody like Scarlet goes."
"Yeah." He wasn't listening, Courtney. He was drifting off in his head,thinking things like, 'You couldn't possibly empathize with a death like Scarlet's death.'
"I lost my mother, last year..."
"I know." This is not an opportunity for you to talk about your problems.
"She was a good woman."
"She was."
"Like Scarlet."
She was nothing like Scarlet. "It's all right. How's the wife?"
"She's fine. The kids are good, too. I'll talk to somebody about your time off. After I hang up, I'll do it."
Courtney didn't say anything.
"I'm worried about you, Court."
"Don't be. I'll be all right."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Age twelve.Texas roads. Dry and hot and empty, all long and out and in and all over can't concentrate this is Texas. Twele. No ability to focus, just everywhere and happy about it. No problems, really. More problems than other kids, but problems are for adults to deal with. No big, important choices, so no boundaries, no say-so in your life. You're just a kid, kid.
Twelve and Texas and pancakes and the air conditioner is broken in the truck. Your grandmother's boyfriend came to pick you up in his...
Red.The truck is red and it rumbles.
He drives on hundred miles per hour down the highway, with all the windows down and the music blaring.
It's fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot, out, so he pulls over at every hotel you see.
He says, "Nobody will know if we do or don't hop in the swimming pool. If they ask, we'll tell them that we're staying at the hotel. It's not a big deal."
You, your sister, and him, you all go swimming.
You call it 'pool hopping', and you do this the entire eight hour road trip to your grandmother's house.
And you don't know it, yet, but you're riding with the Big Bad Wolf.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The problem with telling people that you're a psychiatrist is this -- everybody thinks you're a psychologist, when all you can really do is run meds. You aren't there to listen to people about their lives and their problems, but they're all intent on telling you about what's wrong in their life.
Courtney wasn't a psychiatrist, he was a psychologist.
And the problem with telling people that you're a psychologist is this -- everybody wants you to tell them what's wrong with them, to analyze them for free, to help them get through their problems in five or ten minutes, to give them advice on where they should take their lives. In fact, the majority of them think your life is perfect, and they want you to lead their life for them, make all their decisions. (Everybody's always looking to be relieved of responsibility.)
It's the same problem, if you're a doctor. Everybody wants a free consultation. You can be at a cocktail party, and somebody'll passingly ask what you do for a living, and you'll tell them, then everybody -- drunk -- starts asking things like, 'How about this rash? Does that look like anything to you?'
Courtney didn't tell people -- when he talked to people, at all -- what he did for a living. He didn't want to get involved with people who wanted free consultations. Jesus Christ, they got under his skin. As if his entire identity was his job. As if his job was supposed to make him some type of humanitarian on some type of mission to save the world from mental disorders.
He didn't work for free.
People always want other people to work for free, but he didn't. He didn't give out mini sessions to people in dire need. He didn't, because he had to put food in his mouth, too. He had to keep a roof over his head and pay off his school loans and fix his car, just like any other person.
Was his entire identity his job?
He flipped thrugh files, in his room, at Bunk, thought about renting that trailer that Pi told him about. He needed to move his things into it, needed to pay her rent.
The cat mewled and rubbed against his ankle.
Rachel -- his orchid -- was dead. Or she might as well be, because...
She was past all hope for survival.
It started with a sweet, ripe yellowing at the centers of her leaves -- the way a human thins out and gets dark circles under their eyes, as they starve to death. He'd watched her run out of nourishment, watched her run out of water. It wasn't so much a sadistic glee he felt, as she died, but a grim satisfaction as his curiosity was sated. How long could Rachel live? How long could he?
He'd left her that way, on purpose, and nobody had tried to save her. The people who came into the room and fed the cat? Weren't worried about Rachel, who sat on the windowsill, drying up in old soil. She could have been a child, you know. Plants feel, like that. She could have been a pet cat or a vegetable who needed lots of tender care.
If she was a person, she'd be in a hospice, not the ICU.
She was his first murder.
Her leaves were curled in, browned, withered and dry. She had never flowered.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Jesse had energetically imprinted on Courtney. He'd left several snapshots of himself under Courtney's skin, in his body, surging and quelling. He'd left pieces of bloodlust, there, and Courtney's energetic sensitivity caused that bloodlust to gather in the corners of his mouth, to make his teeth throb with a newfound urge for, what he could only assess was, cannibalism.
In fact, everybody Courtney met -- or you meet, for that matter -- left an energetic imprint on him, even if he didn't realize it, yet. He was in the stage before Empathic ability, before Empathic awareness. At the moment, the sum total of his Empathy didn't aid him. If it did anything, it hindered and crippled him -- a total inability to separate himself from another person, completely feeling what they were feeling, being invaded by their energies, leaving him not knowing the difference between what was and wasn't his.
He was under a type of psychic attack, psychic pressure, psychic antagonism, being bombarded from every angle.
We spread apart, then come back together, like the strands of a double-helix, DNA. We change one another, irreparably. Every time we have a human connection, nothing can ever be the same.
Nothing would ever be the same.
His pancakes tasted like nothing. They tasted like paper. An imprint from Dominique's hunger. He tasted nothing.
The very first time he'd come to Harper Rock, all he wanted was comfort food. A stack of pancakes. And there was Lancaster, staring him in the face, telling him, no, they didn't have any pancakes, at Lancaster's -- it was a bar, after all, what a stupid, sleep-deprivation-induced question.
One of those questions derived from being in a space-alien-come-to-Earth, where you don't know anything, where you are new, like a child.
Courtney's sucked on his upper lip, then his lower, gathered up spit to swallow.
He'd given up smoking, a while back, but he'd taken it up, again, recently, and smoking was in full swing. He smoked one. After he smoked one, he smoked another. After he smoked another, he smoked another, his jittering fingers relaxing.
He started thinking maybe Harper Rock wasn't the problem.
Maybe he was the problem. Maybe he was crazy.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
He sleeps with you. When you go fishing, out on the lake, he sleeps with you in the back of his truck, and you think it's normal, because you come from a family where cuddling isn't a big deal. When your aunt -- you live with her, your aunt -- asks you if you think you're too old to cuddle, you say, "No. I'll never be too old. When I'm twenty one, I want to cuddle, then my kids will cuddle, too." Nobody re-inforces the 'do not touch' boundary, in you. It's a lesson the world will teach you. It will teach you harsh and cold, like it teaches all things, because no lesson is 'good' or 'bad', they are just universal laws, universal lessons that exist. As Shakespeare says, 'Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.' The world -- nature -- isn't lenient, like people. Nature doesn't get lazy, doesn't take a day off, doesn't give in, when you cry, like a tired parent.
Your grandmother doesn't make a big deal out of him sleeping with you.
It isn't strange, to her, that there's a man she hardly knows, sleeping with her twelve-year-old grandson in the back of his truck, covered in a tarp. Then, again, it wasn't strange for a stranger to move in with her, to make camp in her house. They've known each other a month. It wasn't strange to her, when he stuffed you in a garbage bag, and you escaped by putting a hole in it and poking your head through. But you laughed, then, about the garbage bag, about wrestling against him, trying to escape. It was snot-nose funny, when you were twelve.
It's not so funny, now.
It isn't funny, because you know all about 'grooming' about 'special attention' because you can see everything he was doing. Surely, somebody else noticed. Nobody said anything about it. Another lesson the world has taught you -- even when you're a child, nobody will defend you, you have to learn to defend yourself, your innate human rights, your body. You have to learn to guard your heart.
He creates a tent for you, in that truck's bed. He straps a blue tarp over your bodies, stretches it taught, and everything is cast in a quiet, navy glow. It enchants you. He sleeps with you, under there, when you go fishing with him, your sister, and your grandmother, when you're twelve. He invites you under there, with him, and your grandmother doesn't say anything about it, and you don't know how people are, yet, so you agree.
He takes you fishing.
You get sunburnt, out on the lake. When you get back to your grandmother's house, he pours vinegar all over your back and stomach, your legs and head.
It stings, but it works. It takes the heat out of your red, welted skin.
You play in your underwear, in the mud, after, with your sister. She's in her underwear, too, and your grandmother doesn't say, 'Get inside and put some clothes on,' instead, she sits back and watches while she drinks her Coors Light.
And, one night, he takes you and your sister down into the creek. Maybe your sister wasn't there, but she's there, in your head, when it happens. She's there, with you, and you're both covered in creek-stink. He takes you down where the alligators live, even if you don't know they live there, at the time, and he tells you to lay down in the water and the sticks. He covers you in mud and plants, then takes pictures of you pretending to be dead.
That's what he tells you. "Pretend you're dead."
You will spend the rest of your life trying to figure people out.