Private Therapy

Chapter Three-1

Chapter Three

On his last night in the clinic Karl lay awake long after he’d been put into bed. He lay awake even after the movie he was watching on his laptop ended, leaving him in the silent dimness of his denuded room. Three things kept him from sleep.

First was the thought of the state home he’d somehow escaped – provided Doreen’s confidence was well-placed and he didn’t just end up being admitted there unchanged after another year. His ambivalence about the place had passed. With no control over his destination, he hadn’t bothered to worry about it. Like the accident it was something he couldn’t change, and so had to be accepted with deadened affect. Sometimes repression is the only alternative to suicidal despair. Now that he’d been given this miraculous reprieve however he was finally allowing himself to consider what he’d escaped.

There would have been no private room and beautiful doting nurse there, that was for sure. And his laptop full of entertainment would have been stolen within hours. The food would have been even more (probably far more) institutionally unpalatable and the level of care abysmal: again, no highly trained and motivated RN seeing to his daily hygiene, feeding, positioning and exercises but scruffy, minimum-wage orderlies and aides. That meant bedsores, urinary infections, contractions in his arms and legs, neglect and cruelty whether casual, malicious or systemic and yes, the unrelenting attentions of the predators in residence as well. And while he no doubt deserved all this and even more he was still enormously relieved now to have escaped it – at least temporarily. It remained to be seen if his saintly sweet Doreen could indeed redeem him completely. And that was the second thing keeping him awake.

How exactly did she propose to unravel the subconscious tangle everyone was convinced was keeping him crippled? It really did seem there was some s****l subtext to her portents. Did she mean to kiss (or even screw) him back to life like some kind of male sleeping beauty? As unbelievably exciting as this idea was (and as profoundly upsetting to his lingering grief, blame and self-hatred) Karl remained dubious about its efficacy.

He wasn’t about to forget what he’d done, much less forgive himself for it, just because the most wonderful woman in the world took an inexplicable fancy to him, or smothered him in affection and ecstasy that was the opposite of what he deserved. No, he couldn’t afford to get his hopes up for a cure, or even for the possibility that his reluctant lust was going to be indulged.

He could only do as he’d promised. He must fight off the ennui he’d been languishing in for over a year and commit himself heart and soul to this intense new therapy, this unorthodox new treatment no matter what it entailed. Nurse Drake was making enormous sacrifices and assuming herculean burdens on his behalf. He owed her a commensurate effort in return. Perhaps he could use the change in surroundings and situation as a spur to finally seriously confront the issues afflicting him. It was his only chance for healing after all, and to escape from a lifetime of helpless suffering, degradation and unspeakably repellent abuse.

With that resolution in place, the last thing keeping Karl from rest was the usual source of his insomnia. Simply put, he was afraid to go to sleep. He was haunted almost nightly by recurring dreams of the only other girl he’d ever loved, the one he’d killed through his unconscionable behavior. These generally ended in one of two ways, the one slightly more endurable than the other. Karl dreaded both in what they collectively said about him.

Even a body as sedentary as his needed its down time however. Eventually this overcame his anxiety, and Karl dropped off. Soon enough a familiar tragedy in three acts was playing out: a shadow-play from his subconscious on the stage of his awareness.

At first this was an awesome dream, one he entered into eagerly. There was an uneasy foreboding lurking behind his revelry, a prescient knowledge that such heaven couldn’t continue, that he was only being set up for disaster. That didn’t matter though. For now the clock had been turned back. Some shattering episode had been abrogated. He was sixteen again, fit and happy and glorying in the function of his athletic young body. He was in love with a girl who loved him in return, one of the hottest girls in the school even. Last fall he’d been captain of the JV soccer team and she’d been the captain of the JV cheerleading squad. This year they’d both be moving up to varsity and next year they’d rule the school. This was still summer however: sunny and seventy-five and just an absolutely beautiful afternoon. They were on the back patio at Krista’s house, playing a little one-on-one basketball. Karl dribbled, faked, dodged around his girlfriend and went in for a layup, exulting far more in the mere ability of mobility than in gaining two points they weren’t bothering to count anyway. They were just killing time, waiting for the right opportunity to slip away for a far more intimate, energetic encounter.

Both Krista’s parents worked during the day. Her brother Taylor, home from college for the summer, was expected to serve as chaperone. Unlike the stereotypical overprotective older brother however, he remembered his own teenage days. He didn’t care what his sister did, was even sympathetic as long as she was discreet and he remained un-incriminated. Now he poked his head out his bedroom window and called down to them.

“Hey, I’m trying to read up here. Why don’t you guys find something better to do?”

“You’re the boss!” obliged Karl. Taylor ducked back inside. Karl looked at his girlfriend. God, she was so beautiful! Flaming red hair twisted into a thick cable down her back, her china-blue eyes alight with love and invitation, gorgeous Krista gave him a smile like a dollop of whipped cream and made a little jerk over her shoulder with her head. That was enough for Karl. He rolled the basketball away and jogged after her as she hurried across the lawn to the path through the woods.

She was running now, and pulling away from him. As he passed from sunlight into the shadow of the trees, sleeping Karl’s foreboding recurred. Anxiously he ran faster, a couple hundred feet through the massive old oaks, maples and other hardwoods. Finally he caught up with Krista at the tree-house.

This had been built by Taylor and his friends and was a damn respectable structure. It was also extremely convenient. Karl hurried up the ladder (two-by-sixes nailed to the trunk) after his girlfriend, panting with more than just exertion. Milk-white and edged with orange freckles, Krista’s inner thighs pumped and flashed, beckoning him upward. Her perfect ass worked in the tight shorts she wore and the shape of her vulva was sweetly molded. Karl followed all this eagerly through the trapdoor. By the time he’d joined her in their regular love nest he had a blued-steel boner tenting out his own shorts. Krista was already settling onto a big old bean-bag chair that took up much of one corner. Freckled cheeks flushed and her entire lovely face alight with excitement, she was a prize any guy would die for.

“Did you get it?”

In answer Karl reached into his pocket and pulled out the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack. With a grin he flashed the doobie within. Krista mimed clapping and exulted with their pet phrase for these situations.

“Nothing like a buzz to get the best out of love!”

“You got that right.”

Karl lit up and settled into the beanbag next to her. They each took a toke or two, and then he carefully butted and rewrapped the rest. Krista was popping a peppermint into her mouth and Karl took her into his arms.

“Feel like sharing that?”

With that they were kissing: making out like mad in fact, their dueling tongues chasing and swapping the little candy around their open mouths as it dissolved. Krista was groping in his lap, gripping the hot pole of him through his gym shorts. Meanwhile his own hand explored under her t-shirt, slipping her bra up off her beasts so he could cup and squeeze and marvel as always in the firmness yet yield of each delightful handful. But then the peppermint was gone, cottonmouth was starting to kick in and making out was a shade less rewarding. They broke apart and without discussing it Krista pulled her t-shirt off, unhooked and removed her bra.

More freckles spotted the slopes of her breasts. The n*****s were big, bulbous and cherry-blossom pink. As Karl took one in his mouth a part of his sleeping awareness that knew this was only a dream reveled as always in the richness of difference between dreaming and waking memory – all he still had of this vibrant and incomparably special girl. He could actually feel the little nubbles of her ducts against his tongue, smell her healthy young flesh and taste the tang of her sweat. Though he hadn’t touched pot since the night of the accident he was feeling all the effects of a good buzz, especially the perceptual enhancement and emotional magnification that made making love so gratifying under its influence. Wallowing in this total-recall sensory glut and practically bursting with love and arousal, Karl dallied through the usual foreplay until he and his beloved were both naked and the real magic was about to begin. Then the first proof of that foreboding intruded, robbing this dream of its delight.

The trouble arose, as it often did lately, when they differed over which position to couple in. Krista still wanted to straddle and ride him. Karl resisted as always, feeling irrationally that there was something unmanly about this. Even as the sleeping awareness witnessing this winced in chagrin and wailed in remorse, the sixteen year-old asshole he had been once again thoughtlessly bullied his precious soul-mate into doing it his way. That rightly seemed to sour the encounter however, ruling out one of the possible endings to this dream – and portending perhaps the worse one. Just as he finally had Krista splayed out below him and was rearing for the plunge, her cell phone buzzed. Foreboding closed in as she reached for this. Prudence required she check it, and prudence was proved right.

“s**t, it’s Taylor. Mom’s on her way home. We have to get back to the house right now!”

Hurriedly they yanked their clothes back on. Slipping through the trapdoor, they scrambled down the ladder. At once Krista sprinted for the house, but Karl paused a moment at the base of the tree. How long had they been up there?

Not even long enough for a quickie, replied his blue balls and only reluctantly receding rigidity. Yet suddenly it was already dark out. Instinctive terror pounced – a fear far greater than could be ascribed to the mere threat of being caught fooling around. Krista called to him to hurry and Karl dashed after her, running with the useless sludginess common to all nightmares. And that’s what this suddenly was.

Krista was in some sort of danger. Karl knew it intuitively, and he knew it was somehow connected to his pigheaded insistence on getting his way all the time. He should have let Krista ride him. Then none of this would have happened: the text from her brother, the scramble from the tree-house, the darkness and the danger. Instead they’d be locked in a loving copulation presaging all the thousands they’d eventually enjoy as high school sweethearts married for life.

Desperate as he was to overtake and protect Krista from whatever horrible threat he had invited by bullying her again though, Karl suddenly realized he’d lost her entirely. The glimmer of her white t-shirt had disappeared; in fact he’d lost the path too. He was just running pell-mell through the darkened woods. And somehow he wasn’t high anymore, at least not primarily. He was drunk instead. Cheap, hastily chugged beer sloshed in his belly as he blundered into trunks, lost and disoriented and blubbering in his terror for Krista. On and on, he thrashed through the forest, a phantasmagoric netherworld worthy of Tolkien. He had no idea where he was, only that he was becoming ever more frantic. But at last looking up he saw the black bulk of the tree house. Somehow he’d gotten turned around; maybe he was even running in circles. Relieved a bit to have his bearings again but still unaccountably terrified for the love of his young life, the future wife that he’d been so stupidly and habitually mean to (never again, I swear, I’m so sorry!) he charged through undergrowth denser than he remembered to emerge again at the base of the ladder. There he skidded to a stop, shrieking in denial.

Krista! Here she was at last, crumpled at the foot of the trunk! Karl hurried up to her and then staggered back, horrified and revolted and consumed by the most virulent self-loathing imaginable. She was dead, this gorgeous, sweet, unconscionably brow-beaten beauty, dead!

In his muddled awareness, Karl scrabbled for answers. She must have fallen hurrying down the ladder after their illicit tryst, though her injuries seemed much too severe for just that. Jesus, God, her head was broken open, one of the eyes actually dislodged from its socket! Blood and what looked like moldy cottage cheese were spilled out all over the dress she’d chosen for the party (what party?) and her neck was kinked and twisted around in the most gruesome fashion. The sight was unspeakably grisly and yet somehow familiar: explicitly detailed, clinically convincing. Total recall strikes again, or maybe photographic memory. Yet even as he reeled in horror, and in grief, guilt, and self-hatred, the execration he felt for himself was compounded by the outrageously self-serving thoughts that sprang into his panicked head.

This was his fault, and everyone would blame him for it. They’d been partying, and conniving to screw, duping both of their parents, and he was going to be in so much trouble! Suddenly even in the tangle of the woods he heard sirens – not ambulance sirens, it was far too late for that, these were police sirens. He’d killed her, and they were coming for him. Forget about ruling the school, Homecoming king and queen and all that, forget about college and marriage and careers, he was going to prison for life, where his enviably perfect young body, long hair, good looks and lack of hirsuteness would see him turned into everyone’s b***h in minutes. Desperately Karl looked around, searching for any escape. Then he saw the rope.

This used to hang from a limb a dozen feet above the structure, and served as a swing, or an alternate route up and down. Krista’s parents had ordered it removed, deeming it too dangerous. Suddenly it was back, and dangerous indeed. Rather than feature a series of knots to facilitate climbing and descent, it now had just one: the coil and loop of a hangman’s noose.

Well why not? His life was over anyways. This was his fault, he couldn’t live without terribly wronged Krista, and death was preferable to a lifetime of bitter self-hatred. In fact it was the only honorable course open. Karl climbed the ladder, stretched for the rope and fitted it about his throat. Before he jumped though he spared one last look at the wonderful girl he’d betrayed, the mate he loved so much and had proved so unworthy of. And though she still lay dead, brains spilling from her cloven head, neck broken grotesquely, her open, staring, beautiful blue eyes, even the bulging one, suddenly rolled to fix on him. They were filled with terror and despair and mute, irrefutable accusation. Though almost expected after so many horror flicks this was still just too much. He leaped shrieking from the tree as insanity descended…

Karl woke gasping, tears puddling in his ears.

From his cheekbones through his temples, his eyes to the blonde hair on the pillow he was cool and very wet. His face flamed by contrast, yet even in his soul-rending anguish he found room for relief that the wetness was only up top.

When the dream (the setting and circumstances changed, but it was always essentially the same dream) went the other way, his unconscious erection had been known to be so fierce that it pushed the condom catheter off. On occasion the eventual culmination was then so powerful and affecting as to bring on the nocturnal emissions that betrayed his general neurological health.

Then on top of the heartbreak and self-loathing consuming him in the aftermath of this ecstatically traumatic ordeal he would have to call for the night nurse – or lie humiliatingly splattered and in whatever urine he passed until understanding Doreen arrived to clean him up in the morning. No, though it filled him with terror and anguish and guilt, and left him crying and shaking involuntarily, Karl thought he actually preferred the unhappy ending, and not just because it spared him such embarrassment.

Confronting what he’d done (and remembering what he’d seen next to him in the wrecked car) was absolutely shattering every time, but at least it was condign. Enjoying blissful lovemaking with exquisite lost Krista to the glorious finish was unbelievably sublime yet felt like the most hideous offense upon waking. It filled him with even greater self-hatred than that which drove him to put the subconscious noose around his neck. And lurking behind this was the unconscionably selfish dread with which he regarded the eventuality of finally trying to achieve climax while conscious.

How would he react then? It was possible he would never experience an orgasm again that wasn’t merely a cue for emotional evisceration. Indeed his anxiety about this might prove so severe as to lead to impotence, and wet dreams might end up being the only kind of carnal release open to him. All this was upsetting enough. Yet this ending was the ‘life dream’ in contrast to tonight’s far more frequent death dream.

Karl didn’t need an accredited psychiatrist to explain these things to him. Together the dreams meant that on a subconscious level he remained mostly ambivalent about his recovery. Deep inside, he was undecided whether he wanted to rejoin life or accept the living death of the state home. Both life and death tormented him almost unendurably. Yet for the time being it seemed death still tormented him less.

Karl sighed, his heart rate finally calming somewhat, his breathing easing.

Sweet Doreen had her work cut out for her. Yet not all hope was lost. He must remember his promise both to her and to himself to reciprocate her efforts wholeheartedly. Remembering their parting earlier, and the inexpressibly cherished kiss she’d gifted him with, Karl suffered again the conflict between what he felt for her and how he felt about himself. This time however life came out on top. With that encouraging coal glowing in his chest he at last slipped back into sleep, still dwelling on that brief press of her lips against his forehead.