The Night Therapist

Her name was Ana, and she lived as a prisoner within the cage of her bones. That sense of trapped and stunted identity was what brought her to the clinic on Bat Moon Street. It walked her along the cracked sidewalk under the cloudy night, her eyes on the concrete beneath her shoes. Sensible shoes with low heels and closed toes. Librarian shoes, clasping tender feet that rarely came out after dark. Watching her from the window above the striped awning, I could imagine the trembling thrill that gripped her. How daring she was, to leave her safe, lamplit apartment and its familiar solitude to wander along this dim street. How brave, to enter this neighborhood of after-sunset trade, alone and small amidst the old buildings with their aggressive griminess and narrow stairwells like tunnels of night. Yes, I could feel her heart quaking from three stories up. That is how it begins here, evening upon evening, the supplicants arriving, begging to be freed.

Transition can be frightening, I tell them. It is what I said to Ana, sitting huddled on the settee across from me, in the soft light of my office. I do not like to assault the darkness with glaring overhead racks of fluorescent bulbs. I encourage shadows, and the dreamy slipping of the senses they engender. Ana listened to my voice with the attention of a schoolgirl trying to grasp an important, yet difficult, concept. She cringed away from the breathing shadows, then started back against the deep cushions as I shifted forward in my chair. I could see that the tiny cocktail table between us was, in her estimation, an insufficient barrier. And so, it was.

“Why do you have only nighttime hours?” she asked.

I approved her curiosity. The little white hand reaching tentatively out from the prison of her timidity, ready to grasp what it wanted.

“These are the dreaming hours,” I said. “The hours when the inner self comes out from hiding and shows us its truth. Now is when we can most easily become the creatures we were meant to be.”

Ana’s gaze settled as I spoke, fixed on my own. Lethargy, I thought, projecting it toward her. In my mind, I held her floating body in deep water and slowly pushed her under.

“I can’t let go,” she whispered. “I can’t release my old patterns, old fears.”

I smiled. “That’s why I am here.”

I moved swiftly to grasp her by the hair, pins and combs falling around us as I pulled her head back. Her pale throat struggled to form a scream, but her limbs tumbled away from her, open and loose as a doll’s. Her mouth gaped. Down there, in the red dark, I could see a flutter as of a shadowy wing – not feathered like a bird’s, but soft and ashy like that of a moth. I lay a hand across Ana’s staring eyes, closing them.

“Give me your dreams,” I murmured in her ear.

#########

In her dreamworld, Ana called herself Marisol. Marisol, too, is a solitary creature, but one for whom solitude is power rather than prison. When I first saw her, she was with a lover, a faceless male form of great beauty. She crouched over him, taking her pleasure with no regard for him, slapping his hands away as she rode him, laughing at his obedience. Her honey and cinnamon hair hung to her waist in a wild, sweaty tangle. Her skin was kissed golden by the sun. This woman did not spend her days buttoned into long wool skirts and cardigans, sipping weak tea in lifeless offices. I stood in the corner, just one more pattern in the bohemian disarray of her bedroom, watching as Marisol gyrated her way to release. Her eyes rose to mine and fixed there, the satisfied smile never leaving her lips.

“Ana thinks I’m wicked,” Marisol said, rolling away from the man on the bed and to her feet with catlike grace. She reached for a deep red dress tossed atop a heap of colorful pillows.

“No, it’s not that. She wants to be you,” I said. “But she is afraid.”

Marisol slipped into the dress and wound her hair into a careless chignon that she secured with a pencil. She glanced at her lover. The man had shrunk to a tiny, perfect doll on the rumpled sheets--a homunculus--that she scooped up and dropped into the handbag she tossed over her shoulder. Her shoes lay by the door, red like the dress with peep toes and high wedge heels. She stepped into them.

“What’s to fear?”

“She is afraid of your power, Marisol. She is a rabbit, sated on the security of her little nest.”

“That’s funny,” Marisol said, yawning like the cat she resembled. “I’m hungry.”

#########

We went on like that, Ana and I, for a full moon cycle. Twice a week, she came to me, each time smaller, thinner, weaker. Like a deer in the implacable grip of a puma, she only kicked feebly at the onset of her transformation and then acquiesced.

“I must be ill,” she said. “I can’t understand why I feel so weak, as though I’m dwindling, dying. There is no pain. I’ve seen my physician, and he only gave me vitamins to take. Is it you? Are you doing something to me in these sessions?”

She did not seem frightened. She was too limp to feel such a strong emotion. Her question was mild curiosity, the last vestige of interest in the life she so desired to escape.

“You are not ill, Ana. And I am only helping you, as you asked me to do. Soon, you will achieve the transformation you sought. Are you afraid?”

“Yes,” she said, but her reply was listless. “I thought of no longer coming to see you. I thought I would stop, but when the nights come for us to meet, I am eager. You are killing me, and I want you to kill me.”

“I am not killing you, Ana. I am presiding at your birth.” I sat close to her on the settee and pulled her tiny frame against me. “Now, dream.”

#########

When I next saw Marisol, there were candles everywhere. They lit the long table where her feast was laid out, and they covered the bare stone floor in honey-scented pools of flickering light. From niches carved into the stone walls, they winked at me. The smell of their heat and of the pure beeswax warmed the air like prayer. I thought, at first, that we were in a chapel, but as my eyes adjusted to the wavering illumination, I saw that we were shut into a tomb.

From her supine position on the table, Ana looked at me with mute, glimmering eyes. Her naked form glowed white in the gloom, her face beatific in its agony and acceptance. Marisol had eviscerated her. I ignored Ana’s beautiful, bloody twin as I stepped to the edge of the table.

“Ana, are you in pain?” I asked.

“Yes.” Her throat worked to draw in the breath for speech, and a tear slipped over her cheek. “It is pain beyond pain, fear without end. But, look at her-” here, Ana’s head rolled to the side so that she could gaze at Marisol’s slaughterhouse radiance- “she is strong and perfect.”

“Do you want to continue, my little one?”

She coughed, a weak and gasping effort that was more like a gagging sound.

“Yes,” she said.

At that, Marisol shouldered me aside and lowered her crimsoned face to her meal.

#########

Ana changed. Though I expect these things, always I am stunned by the miraculous. She no longer hunched inside her oversized sweater, nor crept along the street in her sensible shoes with her handbag clutched before her like a shield. Now, she strode along under the night as though she were part of it. I watched her from my window as she arrived for our sessions. Her easy gait and frank regard attracted the attention of the night community. If someone shouted to her from a shop as she passed, she shouted back or waved. Once, I even saw her stop to talk with the tattooist across from me. She took his card and patted his cheek. Miraculous.

“You have become confident and outgoing,” I praised her. I noted the tastefully applied makeup and fashionable clothes she wore. “You wear your hair down quite often now.”

She tossed it and laughed. It swung about her shoulders in well-behaved waves.

“It’s silly, isn’t it, how such a small thing can change one’s attitude?”

I smiled. “It is the other way around, Ana. Your attitude has changed how you present yourself.”

“I suppose you are right.” She sighed. “Still, I am not happy. There is something…a crawling dullness that rises up to choke me just when I think I’ve conquered it.”

I opened my arms and she slipped against me, warm and vibrant.

“Let’s dream together,” I said.

#########

Marisol paced the length of the tomb, nude except for the wild tumble of her hair and a heavy, iron key that hung from a length of cord around her neck. The key swung between her blood-streaked breasts as she paced and whirled, her gory hands clenching and unclenching. She was more beautiful in the guttering candlelight than ever, the gathering shadows caressing her, yet she was crazed with fear and anger. She turned to me as I emerged from the gloom and held up the key, shaking it in my face.

“It won’t work,” she hissed. “I’ve eaten all there is to eat, and still, I cannot unlock the door.”

She gestured toward the remains of Ana on the table, flayed and gnawed down to the bones, but with the head and throat intact. Her gaze shot sidelong toward her ruined twin, as though she could not bear to look upon her.

“Her face,” she whispered. “It is all that’s left, and I cannot…I cannot do it. Will we both perish in this tomb?” Her fierce eyes turned to me. “You. You’ve done this. Help me, or I swear I’ll grow fat upon your corpse.”

She seemed more than ever like a cat, a great predator of the jungle, sleek on murder. I believed that she would do as she threatened, or at least try. I forced myself to go to the table, the abattoir mess of it and its stink of old blood, and to examine what was left of Ana. I am not easily shaken, but to my horror I realized she lived still. Her heavy eyelids opened enough for me to see the fevered glitter behind them. Her jaw creaked downward, spilling blood…down, down, until I thought it would unhinge. Her throat and then her tongue convulsed.

“Aaaghhh,” she groaned.

The sound was repeated, and her tongue fell to the side with a heavy slap, hanging from her mouth like a devil’s tail. Breath rattled in her throat, the rags of her exposed lungs fluttering. Something else fluttered, something grey and drab, and scuttled up into the dark safety of her trachea. I leaned toward her, my disgust shoved aside in the sudden excitement of clarity. I recalled Ana’s words in my office…a crawling dullness that rises up to choke me…

Marisol leaped to my side. “What is it? What do you see?”

Without a word, I placed a hand over Ana’s gaping mouth and plunged the fingers of my other hand upward, into her trachea. I touched the creature there, felt its hairy, segmented belly and the compressed tissue of its wings. It scrabbled away from my touch, emerging into her mouth, where I was able to clench my fist around it and drag it from her. The feel of its clotted fur and spiny legs squirming against my palm was insupportable. I cast it from me, and it landed with a meaty thud on the table, rumpled and gore bespattered. There, it set to grooming itself, the wrinkled ashy wings plumping out to the span of a man’s hand.

With a triumphant shriek, Marisol brought the heel of her hand down on the thing. Grey, stringy viscera erupted in a terminal splotch. The wings crumbled to dust. Marisol vaulted lightly over the table, tearing the key from her neck as she landed. She thrust it into the lock and pushed her way out into the warmth and sunlight of the upper world, naked and bloody as any newborn babe.

#########

The Ana who began her journey with me died. Far from being a cause of grief, such a death can only be celebrated. Transformation is the trade in Bat Moon Street, in its myriad forms. Ana’s was one kind, and I am proud to have assisted. I wait, looking out over the dark, derelict street with its occasional foggy haloes of neon smearing the rain-slicked pavement. The appointed hour has come and gone, ticking toward ten minutes past, then fifteen. I begin to wonder if…ah, there she is. A young and lovely woman in a slim, black trench coat and knee-high boots with sassy, clicking heels. Her umbrella shields her face from my view, but she stops in front of the tattooist’s shop across the way and turns to look up at me. Her long, savage hair sparkles with errant raindrops. She raises a hand and blows a kiss to me before turning and entering the shop. Marisol.