by Myriam Gurba
I rose and went to my bedroom and hid there. I had to avoid my family. All of them. I didn’t want to keep killing them or molesting them, even if it was just all in my head.
At dinner, Mom came and knocked on my door and I came out only because I didn’t want to draw any suspicion to myself. I went and sat at the table beside Dad like I always did and served myself some green beans and a tortilla and on second thought, an unappetizing pork chop. I rarely ate meat, but maybe I was becoming psycho cause I was iron deficient or something.
I sliced my cutlet into strips and placed one in my mouth. It tasted dry. Dad’s chewing sounded loud. I turned to look at him. His jaw moved, grinding his food, and I got this image of myself jacking him off, biting off his penis, and swallowing it whole like those reptiles who don’t have gag reflexes and swallow things big as human heads.
I snapped my head away from Dad and fought the urge to cry. I shoveled green beans into my mouth and guzzled my glass of fruit punch.
“I’m done,” I mumbled and flew back to my room.
Panting, I ripped my Bible down off its shelf. I combed through it for hours, hunting for any and all passages about demon possession.
Sunday mornings, I usually slept in. The Sunday morning after my subconscious first raped me, I woke up early. And shaking. I didn’t want any more of yesterday’s disgusting ideas.
In slow-mo, I opened my eyes. I turned my head to look out the window. Three white birches. Dad had planted them on a knoll that gently swelled out of our lawn. The trees stood statue still. The usual breeze wasn’t rustling their leaves.
I remained motionless, waiting. Finally, I lifted my hand, examined it. I’d never had tremors before, but now, little jolts of something electrified my muscles. At least there weren’t any of those gross thoughts yet. Maybe it was through.
I pushed the covers off me and climbed out of bed, sliding into my house slippers, creeping down the dark hall to the family room. Sweat turned my hands into prunes. I held my palms up to my mouth and blew on them and blew on my fingertips, too.
Dad looked up from the paper. “You’re up early.”
“Yeah.”
I walked past him, through the family room, to the kitchen table. I poured myself a bowl of Lucky Charms and ate. I made myself watch my family. They looked plain as plain could be, doing the stuff families across America were probably doing with their Sunday mornings, too. Mom was behind me at the kitchen counter, fixing her second or third cup of coffee. Dad was sitting in his armchair in his robe, half done with the editorial page of the Times. Libertad and Vincie were watching Nickelodeon.
I relaxed and swallowed. I thought, “This is my family. I love them.”
I braced myself for nasty thoughts. None came. Maybe it really was over.
Mom said, “Desiree.”
I looked at her. She was stirring sugar into her coffee.
“Take out the trash.” Mom pulled out her spoon, licked it, and pointed at a knotted plastic sack by her feet.
I nodded and smiled, I couldn’t help it; it felt almost euphoric to have my mind back under my control. I went and scooped up the garbage bag and carried it outside, along the concrete path past the roses, across the slab where Mom’s Subaru was parked. Libertad’s decapitated head invaded the calm. It jostled among the things in the white bag, her raw fibers blending with bacon grease, her blood leaking onto rotten banana peels.
I reached the trashcan pushed against our stucco garage and steadied my shaking hands. I heaved the garbage in and even though I knew it couldn’t have been, I untied the knot and took a quick peek just to verify that my sister’s head wasn’t really hidden inside.
Psycho. Mad girl. Fiend. I was fucking crazy.
I was checking the trash for amputations. Decapitations. I was having heart and chest palpitations. My ribcage pounded like a buffalo stampede through the high plains. Where were the high plains exactly? I had high blood pressure. Did that mean I was excited? Eager? An eager beaver? Eager beaver with a fucking meat cleaver! Why was I rhyming? Rye, Rye, Rye, Rye syndrome.
Tears stung my eyes and clouded my vision. This wasn’t how my summer was supposed to be going. I was supposed to be washing my face till it chapped, disinfecting my furniture with ammonia, tapping things and knocking on doorframes with abandon. Instead, I was finally having the big freak out. I was going nuttier than a tin of Planters.
Skirting the garage door, I remembered the hardware Dad stored at his tool bench for his home improvement projects. He had some long metal stakes he used in the yard sometimes. He pounded them into the dirt with a hammer and made sounds like a blacksmith pounding an anvil in his forge. I contemplated hammering one of Dad’s stakes through my eye socket, piercing the front part of my brain, giving myself a homemade lobotomy.
A panicky chill cut through me. I sprinted the rest of the way to the front door and hurried back to my room and burrowed back under the covers. My breathing was out of control; it was bordering on hyperventilation.
In and out slowly. In and out slowly. In and out slowly.
My breath slowed down to normal puffs, and I worked on refocusing my mental energy. Using a meditation technique I’d learned in Drama, I drained my body of tension, imagined it leaking like sand through fingers, out my hands, toes, and the top of my head. With my body relaxed, I forced myself to imagine innocent, gentle things.
Deer. Rabbits. Big-eyed squirrels holding humongous acorns.
An urge invaded my pastoral wonderland. It arrived yawn-like, sneeze-like, welling up from a reptilian place inside me. The sensation itched fuzzy, ticklish, and tight, a wool sweater you’ve gotta pull over your head and get rid of, toss on the floor in a jumbled heap to be forgotten and stepped on. Stepped on.
I had to bleat. I didn’t want to, but I had to. I had to make the sound of certain fuzzy animals I’d been thinking about.
Tension held my muscles hostage again. I folded my arms across my chest. I hopped out of bed and began pacing like an expectant father who can hear his wife shrieking in the delivery room. I went back and forth from my closet to my window, wearing a thin path into the carpet. I would not bleat, I would not bleat, I would not bleat. Humming the tune of “Baa, Baa Black Sheep,” I tried to distract myself.
I halted dead in my tracks and “Baaaa!” flew out of me. I clamped my hand over my mouth to catch it. The sound escaped and echoed, as if bending off the walls of a small cedar barn.
Mom went to the library to get a fresh cache of summer reading material. I joined her.
I stood in line behind her, watching her check out trashy novels, Collins, Krantz, and Steel embossed on their spines. With her loot deactivated and ready to pass through the alarm, Mom scooped it up and carried it to the exit to wait for me.
“I wish I could be as carefree as Mommy and read pulp,” my thoughts began. “Pulp, pulp. Sounds like pulpo. ‘Pulpo’ means ‘octopus’ in Spanish. Octopus. Pussy. Pussy eating–”
“Card?”
I looked at the librarian with relief. The urge to say something naughty had begun building in my throat and her interruption had squashed it. I handed her my card. She scanned it with her zapper and began scanning my books.
“ The Egoand the Id,” she read. “Are you writing a report?”
“Uh-huh,” I lied.
She scanned Understanding Freud. “Intro to Psych?”
I nodded. My body didn’t want me to lie. My elbow twitched, up and out.
We got a dog when I was eleven. We saved her from the pound, but she wasn’t the kind of dog you normally find there. She was a purebred Yorkshire Terrier, a proper British “dogue.” As I sat on a patio bench, trying to think of a good name for her, Dad had watered his bonsais in the backyard.
“What about ‘Cleopatra’?” I said. “Or ‘Nefertiti’?”
A few feet away from me, my Yorkie had growled at nothing. Or maybe it was a ghost. She spun and chased her stubby tail in tight circles and I wondered how she could do that so fast wi
thout falling over. All of a sudden, she quit her circles and took off sprinting in a dangerously straight line. Her head smacked into one of the patio beams, the blow knocking her off her feet. I half expected her to look like a pug when she got up, but when she rose she still had her same snobbish nose. Upturned.
My Yorkie was a champ. She shook off the pain and trotted from the concrete to the lawn where she began doing donuts like a redneck with a new pickup truck. “Yip, yip, yip…” she barked, high-pitched.
“God!” Dad boomed. “That’s a neurotic animal!”
The dog quit her workout to stare at a limp garden hose. She sensed innate evil dwelling within it: It was her enemy. To scare the hose, the Yorkie made a vicious, gut driven, unfeminine sound. This was not a noise I thought terriers to be capable of. It was a possum with rabies on the warpath type of sound.
Dad said, “Geez! Talk about Linda Blair! Why don’t you call her Linda Blair?”
I glared at him. I hadn’t thought it was funny he was comparing my teacup of a pet to the thing that spit up pea soup in The Exorcist. Salomé was what I wound up naming the animal. I had no idea what an omen that was, to name my pet for the girl who’d asked for the head of John the Baptist. At that age, I also had only a nebulous notion that Dad was accusing my Yorkie of something bad with that clinical-sounding term, “neurotic.” I knew that it had something to do with nerves, but now, six years later, sitting on my carpet with Understanding Freud in my lap, Dad’s assessment clicked: Salome was damaged goods. She’d been one hair shy of crazy queen bee bitch.
“Focus,” my survival instinct reminded me. “You have to fix yourself right now. Forget about that dog. She ran away anyways.”
Obeying my instincts, I concentrated on the task at hand. I’d been reading for several hours already in preparation for my own psychoanalysis and armed myself with the fundamental theories of the discipline. As I understood it, I needed to draw into consciousness buried thoughts and feelings. Being neurotic, I tended to repress. This afternoon I was going to have to unleash all my pent-up bullshit, and I prayed my borrowed books could guide me to the light and cut out the middleman.
I cleared my throat and tugged my right earlobe and then the left to even things up. I closed Understanding Freud and set it on top of a pile of tomes I’d already skimmed. I reached for a virgin text. The dull afternoon sun filtered in through my window, making my room feel static, matted in a way that usually bothered me. I didn’t have time, though, to contemplate what kind of sunlight depressed me. I had to jot my observations in my notebook.
“A) Polymorphously perverse…,” I scribbled. I wrote for two pages, using the concept to explain how come I kept having so many sexual and violent thoughts.
“B) I am in an oral, an anal, and a phallic stage…”
“C) I fixate sexually on my mother and my father. I have both an Oedipal and Electra complex…”
I wanted to emerge from my psychosexual drama so bad I could taste it, but according to my guidebooks, I had my work cut out for me. I had to–
Wait.
Freud didn’t make sense. First, he’d said that to cure myself I’d have to draw out my hidden desires and face them. Then, he did a total about face, saying we all have incestuous, serial killer thoughts and that we have to learn how not to act on them, to sublimate them.
I didn’t want to act on mine. That was the last thing I wanted to do. What I wanted was to not have the thoughts. And really, now that I thought about it, what difference did it make if I drew them out? How was that confronting the thoughts? Didn’t I confront them every time they happened? Wasn’t that the problem? That I was confronting them all day long? All the time?
Pressed for time, I set aside my confusion. I realized that head shrinking was a discipline that also involved a certain measure of faith. I found some and kept on trucking. Night fell and with it, I prayed I’d absorbed enough knowledge to go into battle well armed.
Like a girl preparing to have demons cast out, I leaned back so that my body, from my head to my tail, was flattened against the bedroom floor. The soles of my feet were planted firmly to the ground, my knees arched, my legs apart. I folded my hands and rested them on my stomach. I took a deep breath.
Out loud, I started, “I think about killing Mom. I think about killing Dad. I think about cutting people up. I think about eating them. I…” and I admitted and I admitted and I admitted till I’d squeezed out every single bad thought I could remember. Purged, the words hung in the air around me. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. I felt safe. Cleaner.
I shuffled to my knees, they cracked, and I rose and stretched and walked out of my room, across my dark house, to the empty kitchen. Alone, standing at the counter, I ate a Gandhiesque meal: a glass of water and a piece of pita. I felt too exhausted for real food. I set my glass in the sink and brushed a few crumbs off the counter and into the trash and walked back to my unmade bed and climbed in. I dozed off quickly but not before hoping that in the morning, this feeling of purity wouldn’t be gone.
By lunchtime the next day, the ugliness had returned. I smeared peanut butter onto a slice of bread and thought of jamming the knife I was using into Libertad’s ear, into her brain.
I looked at the kitchen walls and the yellow fridge and microwave and felt them closing in around me. Claustrophobia. I wanted a brain transplant. Freud had failed me.
Maybe I was a human monster. Maybe, at heart, I was that rarest breed, the female serial killer. Ed Gein, he and I were birds of a feather. He killed people and gutted them like deer and he grave-robbed and made a nipple/vagina suit out of his neighbors and he was obsessed with his mother. Psycho and Silence of the Lambs were loosely based on him.
Maybe I really wanted to do all this sick shit, just like the books said. The more I probed to get at the root of what was causing my morbid thoughts, the worse they got. Within two short weeks, it was knives slitting every throat I saw. A hundred bloodlettings. Green, brown and blue colored eyeballs hanging by bright, red meat strings. Salad forks rammed up anonymous rectums.
Sigmund Freud couldn’t have been right, though, that I wanted to do this shit. How could true desires terrify me shitless, set off a million silent alarms, make my conscience go haywire? I wanted to pay someone to cut off my arms and legs so that I could rest assured I’d do no evil. I made sure not to stand too close to my family. I avoided my friends. I avoided animals. Watching TV. Being awake. Thought.
Buddhism seemed like the trick. I tried emptying my mind. My imagination relented. It would not be stifled but I needed a crutch to help me withstand the onslaught. A compulsion. Compulsions. A slew of new ones:
– Keep a distance from all living creatures while chanting mental mantras: “I shall not covet. I shall not covet. Forgive me, Lord Jesus in heaven, you know the evil that I am.”
– Unimagine the imagined. Push the rewind button on the VCR while the tape’s still playing and watch everything disappear.
– Apologize to victims, albeit silently, in your head: “I’m so sorry. I will burn in hell for killing you.”
Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. John Wayne Gacy. Desiree Garcia.
I used to joke I was a Satanist. Now I prayed so much to Jesus and the saints that I was worse than the nuns from school. At least it comforted me to know that the holiest of people had been plagued by bad thoughts, too. Saint Teresa of Lisieux. Ignatius of Loyola. I knew they were good, and I was evil, and that even comparing my suffering to theirs was a sin.
I knelt more than I stood.
I wanted to be nailed to a cross.
My mind became a medieval prison. A monastery. I stopped playing games with my Mexican rosary and started using it.
Salt and Pepper
That August, Mom took me to Mexico with her.
Sodom and Gomorrah still defined the landscape of my mind so as we boarded our flight, I forced myself to think happy thoughts about my fellow passengers, especially the pilots. I feared if I didn’t make myself
do this, I’d start imagining myself snapping and committing some awful misdeed, like me strangling stewardesses and hijacking our airplane and crashing it into a six-hundred-year-old Aztec pyramid, a modern day human sacrifice that’d make it onto the world news.
As I struggled to spin compliments like, “Wow, that steward has really nice highlights,” my right shoulder betrayed my inner turmoil. It flinched back like I was an angler reeling in a stubborn ten-pound bass. Before it whapped the big haired lady behind me with the tattooed eyebrows, I grabbed my hand and twisted it.
I turned to face the woman. “Desculpas62?” I begged.
Ugly eyebrows was not very forgiving. She nodded curtly.
Mom found us our seats, and she settled into the one by the window. I eased in beside her and strapped on my seatbelt, pulling it tight. I relaxed my elbows on the armrests and inhaled, holding the air in my lungs. Our ascent began. An exhale and my foot kicked out, tapped by an invisible hammer testing my reflexes. My hand pressed my knee down but the energy escaped through my heel. It tapped, tapped, tapped, and I turned and yanked a pocket book of verse from my bag, hoping that some poetry would calm me down.
Music soothes the savage beast.
Edna St. Vincent Millay. A graduation gift.
Just as I’d begun to lull myself into thinking that my limbs were back under my control, I realized yes, my slim volume was moving. I was moving it. My right hand was flicking it back.
I looked at Mom to see if she’d noticed. The back of her head. White hairs mixed in with black ones. She was gazing out the window.
I shut my book and let it slide into my lap. I shut my eyes.
Mom woke me up. A stewardess was standing beside me with lunch. I opened my eyes long enough to choke down a bite of corn and sip some orange juice and I felt Mom’s eyes on me.
“Are you feeling okay?” she asked.
I nodded.
She reached out and touched my forehead. I wasn’t running a fever. Mom pulled her hand away and rested her head back against her seat cushion and shut her eyes.
