In the Shadow of Angels

by Donnie J Burgess

  Beth lay there in tears, the fight gone.

  Jezebel leaned in close to her. “And you’re every bit as much a whore as you claim me to be. How do you think you get all those fancy clothes, that fancy car, that fancy house, those fancy nails? You’ve never worked a day in your life. You fuck him and he pays for all of it, but you pretend it’s different for you. Well it’s not, princess. You rub your pussy on his cock to get what you want the same way I do. I just don’t lie to myself about it.”

  Jezebel was running her fingers through Beth’s hair. If not for the situation, it would have seemed to be in a loving way. She leaned her mouth to Beth’s ear and whispered, “Maybe If you’d rubbed his cock with your other holes he wouldn’t keep running to me.”

  Jezebel got up, seeing a set of headlights coming down the road. “Now you better just walk away while most of you is still functional.”

  Beth did. She walked back to her car, crying the whole way. She sat in the driver’s seat and watched as Devin went in to get a key, knowing that Jezebel was going to try to fuck him out of spite. Knowing also that once the symphony of temptation began, Devin wouldn’t be able to resist. And she had made it happen.

  She couldn’t say why she did it, but the second Devin went through the gate, she ran to the check in counter.

  “Give me the room next to the guy you just checked in,” She said to the clerk.

  “I can’t really do th…” the clerk started.

  “I’ve got a thousand dollars in my purse,” Beth said. This was the emergency money she carried since Y2K –you never know when the machines will be down. “You ring it up however you want, but I want to be in the room next to them.”

  “Certainly miss…”

  “Umm,” Beth’s mind raced, searching for a fake name, “Sigourney Weaver.”

  What Beth didn’t know was that it was customary to give out the rooms further away from the stairs first, so other people walking by after checking in wouldn’t bother the occupants. She probably just wasted a thousand dollars.

  “And here’s your key. Room 212.” The clerk said, handing her the key. “We’ve got you down for two hour…” The clerk trailed off. He had been talking to her back since handing her the key, now he was just talking to an empty room.

  Beth made her way to the room quickly, went in and shut the door behind her. She wasn’t sure why she was here. Maybe to listen? Maybe she could hear if they were having sex? Maybe Devin would turn her down? She wasn’t even sure if she would be able to hear with the wall between them and what was she going to do if they were having sex? Burst in on them? “A-ha!” she would yell as she watched her husband hammering this tan slut like a tenderizer pounding at a flank steak.

  Then what? Walk back out?

  She could hear the muffled sound of talking coming from the room next to her, but couldn’t make out the words. She leaned her ear to the wall and was able to make out part of the conversation:

  “Now we can play.” Jezebel said.

  “Come on, Jez, I told you I can’t have sex with you anymore. Can we please just talk about the pregnancy?”

  “We’ll get to that, but you already brought me to The Place, it seems like your wife is going to think you did whether you did or not. You might as well…”

  “It’s not about my wife knowing, Jez, it’s about me not wanting to. I don’t want to lie to her anymore. I just want things to go back to normal.”

  “Well we won’t have sex then.”

  Beth leaned away from the wall, relieved. The faintest smile starting to form. Devin turned her down. She propositioned him and he said no. He wanted things to go back to normal. He didn’t want that whore at all.

  The room beside was silent for a time, then she heard the voices again, still muffled. She leaned back to the wall to hear the end of their exchange.

  “Seriously, Jez, we had a good time, but I just need it to be over. If you need any more legal advice, just call me, but this? This has to stop. I have to stop seeing you.”

  “I know, honey, I wasn’t fucking around. I just need the cash and I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Alright, then,” Devin said, “I’ve got about six-hundred in my wallet. It’s yours.”

  He was giving her the kiss off once and for all. They were going to be just fine. Score one for Mary Anne!

  Beth heard Jezebel walk out of the room and shut the door behind her. She heard her footsteps pass room 212. She couldn’t resist the urge to watch her walk away. She hoped she could see her face. She hoped she would look defeated. Beth cautiously opened the door. Even then, she opened it only a fraction of an inch. She wasn’t even sure what she was afraid of. It’s not as if anyone ever saw or heard anything at The Place anyway, but she was trying to be quiet so that Jezebel wouldn’t hear her. Just as she got the door opened far enough to look toward the stairs, she heard Jezebel say, “God damn it.”

  Beth froze for a moment, thinking she had been seen, but there was no more sound, save a scuffling sound coming from the concrete sidewalk. She opened the door just a bit further and saw Jezebel standing there, facing the stairs. Her heel was stuck into one of the many cracks in the sidewalk, but rather than taking off the shoe to try to pry it out, Jezebel was clumsily trying to rock it out by moving her leg back and forth. Her ass was sticking out of her cheap dress the whole time. The shoe wasn’t budging and a thought - no, a compulsion, came over Beth.

  Before Beth was able to rationalize what she was doing, she ran out her door and gave Jezebel a firm push toward the railing. Jezebel’s left leg didn’t follow her body, the foot being stuck in the shoe. By the time her foot came loose, the shoe already snapped at the heel and Jezebel had no chance to regain her balance. She hit the railing and started flailing for a handhold. There was none. Jezebel fell silently, still fumbling for a handhold and hit the sidewalk below hard and flat on her back. It knocked the wind out of her. Beth’s eyes met Jezebel’s for a brief moment and Jezebel’s eyes changed. Was it fear? Anger? Pain? She didn’t know. Beth wasn’t sure if she was hurt, or if she was, how severely, but she knew one thing with certainty: She had to get out of there before Jezebel got up, if she wanted to live. She had shown a taste of what she could do earlier, if she got to her now, she wouldn’t hold back.

  With something deep within compelling her, Beth bolted for the gate to the parking area, jumped in her car and started driving. She wasn’t sure where exactly she was going, but the word away was definitely involved.

  Chapter 5

  When Ulysses Stephens was in grammar school, he learned that there was a theory that the dollar sign was initially designed as the letters ‘U’ and ‘S’ superimposed over each other –an abbreviation for United States. That theory is an alternative to the much more widely accepted belief that it originated as a slash drawn through the number eight, signifying the Real de la Ocho. The symbol of the Real de la Ocho was in use all over the world well before the United States first minted a coin. Despite that, a young Ulysses Stephens latched on to the former. Ulysses Stephens; U.S.; US; $. The dollar sign became his symbol. Perhaps it was cute when he was a youngster, but it was decidedly less so as he got older. He didn’t care. The symbol was on everything he touched. It was on his personalized license plate, every tie tack and cuff link he owned and even the douche-y, dangling, gold earring that he wore when he went out on the town. It was horribly obnoxious.

  Dr. Ulysses Grant Stephens was Ashwood’s most prominent psychiatrist. You would know that because the sign on the front of the building told you so, as did his business cards, phone book listing and website. He was actually Ashwood’s only psychiatrist, which was common knowledge, but much less frequently advertised. He was also a deplorable little weasel whose success was due in no small part to being quick with his prescription pad. That too was common knowledge, but only to those who were looking. By now, his hand could write the words Alprazolam and Diazepam without a great deal of interaction with his brain.

  Over the years, he
had gotten good at his little game. The DEA was no stranger to doctors of his ilk and he was frequently under scrutiny for being so quick with his pad. Early on, he was more brazen, whipping out scripts for narcotics to just about anyone who asked and was willing to pay. As he soon discovered, prescribing narcotics brought him way too much attention. In his profession, benzodiazepines were much easier to get away with. Still on the DEA’s radar, to be sure, but a psychiatrist being liberal with scripts for anxiety and panic attacks, was much more difficult to nail than one doling out hydrocodone.

  Dr. Stephens had a weakness of the flesh as well. In some cases, and particularly where the questionable drugs were involved, he was not above trading his signature on the prescription pad for sexual favors. In fact, there wasn’t much he wouldn’t trade for sexual favors. Always consenting, of course, or so he told himself, despite the fact that the law was very gray on whether a patient could actually consent. His drugs, his testimony, his ethics, they could all be traded for sex. Yes, Dr. Ulysses Stephens was a deplorable little weasel.

  Working to his advantage, any petition for divorce in Ashwood went through his brother, The Honorable Thomas Jefferson Stephens, which was a gross misappropriation of the term honorable. His honor outwardly viewed divorce with the venom of a catholic priest: A failure of man. Inwardly, he could not have cared any less. But he used his position to force the petitioner and respondent to meet with a marriage counselor of their choice prior to dissolution of marriage. Wouldn’t you know it, Dr. Ulysses Stephens was the only game in town.

  Dr. Stephens, for his part, was actually good at that part of his job. Those who sought him out with a genuine desire to repair their marriage found that he was a compassionate doctor with the ability to cut through the bullshit and get right down to the root of the problem. Most who came via The Honorable Thomas Jefferson Stephens, though, were merely a tick on his patient counter. Which, in turn, made his wanton prescription flinging seem much less suspect. If a doctor is seeing a dozen patients and whipping out scripts for every one of them, he is obviously dealing. If a doctor is seeing a hundred patients and medicating twelve of them, he doesn’t seem so unrestrained.

  Among his list of patients were Bethany and Devin Bryant. A couple in their early thirties who were experiencing the seven-year-itch. They needed counseling about as much as tree needs a shiny new car, but Bethany insisted. She never said it was her idea, but it was always the woman’s idea. She also scheduled sessions for herself, Devin and them as a couple. Only a woman would do that. She caught Devin with Jezebel Anders a few weeks ago and was taking it as if she was the only woman whose husband lost the battle of will with his cock. The truth is that in situations like this, there is no counseling to be done for the man. He will either have a head full of regret and treat that woman like a queen for the rest of her life, or he will find that the friction feels better coming from someone else’s cooch and the marriage will be over. No amount of talking about his mother is going to change that.

  The woman, on the other hand, gets her brain all tied up in knots. To her, sex is intimacy and intimacy is love. A woman just can’t think with her dick. When her husband finds some dirty skank who is willing to take it up the ass while he is choking her out, the woman can only picture a bed of roses with some milky skinned goddess, dressed in white, singing a hymn while he makes love to her, all the while planning out a white wedding, 2.3 children and a little house with a picket fence somewhere in the country.

  The woman will always ask, ‘what does she give him that I don’t?’ and the answer is always painfully simple. She is fucking him like you won’t, but she doesn’t want that answer. She will get lost in a haze of insecurity and shattered ego. She has red fingernails, maybe if I paint my nails red, he won’t want to be with her and that kind of thing, never giving a second thought to the possibility that maybe, just maybe, the fact that she is swallowing his dick while he is working one fist in and out of each of her holes like the pistons on a v-twin motorcycle engine might have something to do with it. It is such an easy answer, but it is so difficult to get to. His job would be a lot easier if he could just sit them on the couch and be very direct:

  “Are you going to fuck her again, Devin?”

  “No.”

  “Alright then, I’m done with you. Go watch the game. I need to talk to your wife for a bit.”

  “Okay, Bethany, what you need to do is go to an adult video store and buy any two porno films off the rack. Do everything that those girls do. Everything. And he will never cheat again.”

  Problem solved.

  It is never that easy. Even as a medical professional you have to build a trust with a woman before she will even think about discussing her sex life and she still won’t be honest when she finally does. I give him everything he wants, is what every woman -for all of time- will say. Probably even believe. The reality is that she probably doesn’t even try anymore. She just lays there like a sack of laundry while he pounds away at her like some giant mechanical robot. Second Tuesday every month. Whether she is in the mood or not.

  It is his job to try to say to her, without actually saying it, of course, that he has never seen a divorce come as the result of a man getting his dick sucked too often. Obviously, there is more to it than that, but if you were to strip it down to its core, that would be it. Just throw him a nasty, dirty fuck once in a while and he can imagine that, while you are laying there like a corpse the rest of the time.

  That was exactly the case with Bethany and Devin. Only in this case, the nasty, dirty fucking came from Jezebel Anders. It seems like that shouldn’t even count.

  Dr. Stephens started seeing Bethany and Devin four weeks ago. Their sessions were going along just as he might expect; the couples counseling was doing very little for either of them, but it was a grand gesture. They talked about seeing things from each other’s perspective - feeling what the other one was feeling and forgiving them. The man achieved this more easily, his mind more used to the simple plan of; 1) identify the problem; 2) identify the solution; 3) find the most direct path to the solution.

  For the woman, that same progression would break down to roughly; 1) identify the problem; 2) talk at great length about the cause of the problem; 3) analyze everything that had happened prior to the problem and to try to divine some pattern to the universe which caused this great injustice to befall her; 4) Play the guiltless victim: Whysoever has he betrayed me? He wants for naught. For whilst I knit for him new knickers from the wool of the sheep we raise, I use my body to satisfy his every foul desire. I keep this tower ever so clean, never so much as a fingerprint to fall upon the smooth ivory. Oh! Woe is me; 5) Assign blame to as many people as possible, forgetting the old saying ‘guilt lies with those weak enough to assign blame’; 6) Hate. Again, as many people as possible. This would usually start with the woman he had cheated with, then with him, then the world in general; 7) Identify the solution. The process of identifying the solution would be more difficult to reach for the woman, since in her mind she was completely blameless; 8) Take a meandering course bouncing between steps 2 to 6, depending on the day, to move slowly toward the solution.

  The genuinely happy couple would always take this course, if the husband slipped. The inverse of that was never true. If a woman was cheating on her husband, it was never about the dirty, nasty sex. It was either about a lack of intimacy or a loss of trust. Both of those things were much more difficult to mediate. If the husband cheated, a good counselor could run them through this course in about six weeks. The key was to let the woman talk her way through how badly she was wronged, but to ask her questions leading her to come up with, all on her own, that she might have done, or not done, something that made the temptation outweigh the consequence just that once. Once she realized that her ivory tower had a smudge, she would crash that thing down all on her own. That was the breakthrough moment of therapy you hear so much about. That breakthrough moment came for them while Bethany was in a session with Dr. Stephens on
her own. He helped her understand that what Devin and Jezebel had done was just sex. Nothing more.

  Their marriage was going to be fine. He was sure of that. Devin was remorseful about what he did and it was genuine. When a man cries during a private session, there is some serious regret there. Bethany crossed the major hurdle of realizing that she wasn’t completely blameless in the whole matter and she forgave him. The rest would just be talking through what they would like to see change and what compromises they would make to accommodate each other. They might even be one of the few couples who manage to come out of an affair a stronger and more trusting couple than they went in. Dr. Stephens liked that, it was a validation of his skill.

  He wished his own experience with Jezebel Anders could end so well…

  He met Jezebel Anders a little over two years earlier. She came in complaining about a litany of things; memory lapses, missing time, ‘waking up’ in broad daylight doing something and not sure how she got there, among others. Genuine Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), often referred to as Multiple Personality Disorder, is like the Sasquatch of his profession. Some believe in it and some don’t. Many claim to have seen it, but for every diagnosis there are even more skeptics. Much of that depends on which definition of the disease you are going by. If you are going by the narrowest possible definition: more than one wholly separate identity, with neither identity having any inclination that there might be another, then such a case might not truly exist. Some medical professionals broadened that definition to include any number of altered states of a single individual and by that definition, the affliction was as common as a number of other psychoses.

  Regardless of the particular definition of the disease, though, it was still exceedingly rare. Jezebel Anders showed up at his office practically reading off the checklist of symptoms of DID. That should have sent up some red flags, but he either didn’t see them, or ignored them outright. Even he wasn’t sure which anymore. The other thing to know about DID is that it is one of the most often faked psychoses out there. An intelligent person, who has put in a reasonable amount of time researching the condition, can fake it well enough to fool most psychiatrists. The reason for that is the rarity. So few genuine cases exist that most psychiatrists will never see it in person. They learn from the same textbooks and journals that the intelligent person will have studied. Consequently, that person will be the very textbook definition of the condition and a misdiagnosis will occur. This will lead to further documentation and, in turn, further misdiagnosis.