Boyfriend from Hell

by Avery Corman

  “Probably what I drank.”

  “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I hope so.”

  “This is a bad time to be slipping out again, but the cult leader, the guy who hasn’t been well, he took a turn for the worse. I need to go there, see if I can get in a last interview—”

  “Whatever.”

  His career was the least of her concerns.

  “Probably back within a week. And that should do the traveling for a while. You sure you’re going to be okay?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Feel good, Ronnie. We’ll be in touch.”

  “Sure.”

  She watched television for her article. Nancy called a couple of times. She and Bob had theater tickets that night, would Ronnie need anything from her, she could drop by after work.

  “I’m just going to have a light bite for dinner.”

  “Richard, is he going to look in on you?”

  “He went out of town again.”

  “Of course he did.”

  She slept peacefully that night, not expecting to, and in the morning willed herself to work. She was scheduled to see Kaufman at 2:00 P.M. She anticipated what Kaufman would say, that the scene at the plaza was a variation on the drawings with the same root causes.

  She took a crosstown bus at Ninety-sixth Street to the East Side and transferred to the downtown bus at Second Avenue. She casually looked out the window. A black sedan drew next to the bus and in the second seat a window rolled down, and looking up at her from the open window, smiling, was Satan. She covered her face with her hands and sat that way until the driver announced Thirty-fourth Street, where she got off.

  Ronnie described the manifestations to Kaufman slowly, haltingly.

  “It was like Satan was trailing along as I went to my therapist, a superior look to say, It won’t do you any good, honey.”

  “These fantasies, they’re similar to the drawings, aren’t they? Except you’re giving the symbol of Satan full dimension.”

  “It’s worse, because it’s in my walking-around life.”

  “Veronica, we know you’re fit, physically. And you don’t show the symptoms of schizophrenia. You’re functioning. You’re working.”

  “More or less. But that’s great news, Dr. Kaufman. I’m not schizophrenic.”

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?” she said bluntly.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “A direct question. There is no Satan, Veronica. No Satan who rides around in the back of a car, or sits at a table at a dance in Lincoln Center. You’re imagining him, dreaming him, drawing him, seeing him. And I’m asking why you’re putting yourself through this.”

  “I don’t want to go through this.”

  “I wish I were sure of that. You’re punishing yourself.” She observed Ronnie, who was looking at her hands in discomfort. “Who gets punished in our culture?”

  “I feel like a schoolchild answering. Someone who’s been bad.”

  “Someone who’s been bad. It’s the same origins, the bad girl conjuring up the embodiment of evil—Satan.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Knowing I’d say it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have validity. Once you think of yourself as bad, it keeps building on itself.”

  Kaufman urged Ronnie to go back once again, painful as it was—and Ronnie was very uncomfortable—and talk about her mother’s death, which Kaufman characterized as “your original sin.” She then prodded her to talk about her father’s death, and the sex with Richard, whether she thought taking pleasure in it made her bad, and the article about Cummings, how she was prepared to believe writing it somehow led to his death and made her bad, until Ronnie was weary, eager to get out of there.

  Kaufman wanted to increase their sessions from once to three times a week, “on the clinic’s nickel,” she said, and strongly advised it, to which Ronnie said, “So it’s not just similar to the drawings. This is obviously crazier, these ‘sightings.’”

  “I didn’t say that. I merely feel you could use additional therapy.”

  “I appreciate it, Doctor. I’ll ponder it, with all else.”

  She dared not look out the window in the buses that took her home. In the apartment, she turned on the television set to watch people parading problems that didn’t seem to be in the same world as hers. Nancy came home from work and found Ronnie lying in bed on her back staring at the ceiling. The nightly news was on. Ronnie wasn’t paying any attention to it.

  “This doesn’t look good.”

  “Satan’s been showing up, Nancy. In my life. Not in my dreams, not in drawings. I saw him today, he was in the backseat of a car, and I saw him when I went dancing with Richard, which is why I got sick. It made me sick to my stomach. A horrible face. Human, but not really. A dark angel with a human face and he smiles at me, a sort of condescending smile.”

  “Ronnie!”

  “Dr. Kaufman says I’m not schizophrenic. Just having your run-of-the-mill, explainable hallucinations.”

  “What’s explainable?”

  “I’m someone reliving her mother’s death and a whole arsenal of other guilt. Thinking of myself as bad and conjuring up the ultimate symbol of badness.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Seems to be between me, and me. Right now, I’m going to try to get some writing done. I’ll just have a yogurt or something for dinner. And pretend normal.”

  “She’s supposed to be very good. Is she?”

  “She’s smart. She’s offering me three sessions a week. But it feels like I’m on a train heading toward a station and the station is where it’s safe and I’ll be fine, but the train is moving very slowly and the station is moving, too, even faster than the train, and I’m not catching up.”

  When she met with her husband, Kaufman was not nearly as guarded as with her patient.

  “I told her imagining you’re seeing Satan when you’re conscious is similar to drawing Satan unconsciously. And it is, in a general sense, a variation on her theme.”

  “But it’s more extreme.”

  “It is more extreme. I didn’t want to alarm her. I need to keep her focused on understanding her own guilt. She’s placed a huge burden on herself and she’s accelerated her self-recrimination. A lovely girl and she’s unraveling.”

  “So how wise is it not to alarm her?” he asked.

  “It’s a balancing act. She has to concentrate in the sessions, not be unhinged by what I say. Frankly, I’m a beat away from trying to keep her inside.”

  Ronnie was reading between the lines of Kaufman’s responses. She knew that seeing Satan at a nearby table or through a bus window was a more powerful aberration than illustrating him without being aware of the act, or merely dreaming him. A therapist’s restraint could not conceal from her that a nightmare by day was more serious than a nightmare by night.

  The following morning she sent an e-mail to CR:

  I need to ask you, did you ever see Satan when you were awake? Not in a dream. In a waking state?

  A few hours later she received a response. She stared at it, not wanting to believe what she was reading on her screen.

  I did see him when I was awake. Several times. The first time I remember as if it was today. I saw him across a dance floor.

  On the words “across a dance floor,” Ronnie began to feel ill again. She sent CR an instant message.

  Ronnie: These things are happening to me. I’m desperate. Could you please consider having a visitor?

  CR: My name is Claire Reilly. I’m at Empire State Psychiatric Facility in Cold Spring, N.Y.

  Ronnie: May I come today? Are there visiting hours?

  CR: Visiting hours are open. Come when you wish. I never have visitors.

  Ronnie took the train, an hour and a quarter ride from Grand Central Station, unable to concentrate on the magazines she brought. She resisted looking out the window. She took a taxicab for the remaining ten-minute ride to the
facility.

  The main building resembled a penal institution: a three-story unadorned red brick structure half a city block in size. The grounds were more felicitous: a tree-lined campus with a rolling grass lawn. Ronnie passed through a security guard and electronic scanner and announced herself at the front desk. The guard there called on his phone and she was told to wait in the visitors’ lounge off the main lobby, a room with fluorescent lighting, cafeteria-style tables and chairs, a few unmatching sofas and chairs, and yellow walls decorated with fading art posters. The place had a point-of-no-return atmosphere. The time was approaching 3:00 P.M. No one else was in the lounge.

  After a few minutes a woman in her forties entered in the company of a nurse in a white uniform. Claire Reilly was five feet six, the trace of attractive features in a puffy face; wearing a print dress twenty years out of date, her auburn hair in a ponytail with a pink ribbon. She carried a little matching pink handbag, as though she meant to be at her best for a visitor. Ronnie wondered if she was looking into her future, if this was who she could end up being, in a place like this.

  “Ms. Reilly, I’m Ronnie Delaney.”

  “Will you be all right, Claire?” the nurse asked.

  “Fine. We’re going to sit under a tree. Is that all right with you?” she said to Ronnie. “This room is so institutional.”

  As they headed for the front door, Claire walked slowly, her gait uncertain, and that, along with the puffy face, indicated to Ronnie the woman was living with the effects of heavy medication.

  Claire guided them to a shaded bench. A few patients wandered around the grounds listlessly, with nurses nearby watching out for them. Ronnie felt as if she had stepped into a Diane Arbus photograph.

  “So, my dear, I can see the anxiety in your face.”

  “Terrible things have been happening to me, Ms. Reilly.”

  “I gather. It’s an exclusive circle.”

  “An exclusive circle?”

  “We ladies. I assume we should be flattered. If you read about it, you’ll see some people think we invite Satan in by our behavior. I’m not sure of that.”

  “I’ve been having parallel experiences to yours. I won a race in Central Park. I never ran like that before. Like you swam the English Channel.”

  “The English Channel. It not only feels like another life—here’s the irony, it felt like another life at the time.”

  “And the telepathy and the drawings and the terrible dreams, and now I see him, Satan appears when I’m awake. In a car. Across a dance floor.”

  “Sounds very familiar. You’re possessed, my dear. He’s found his way into you.”

  The chilling remark was said casually and Ronnie shuddered.

  “You say that very confidently.”

  “Well, I don’t have to examine you. I see it in your eyes. Same eyes as I had.” She suddenly became secretive, unbalanced, and whispered confidentially, “You have to watch out for the medication. They start you out to keep you calm, but after a while it becomes how you live. You don’t belong to yourself anymore.”

  “Dear God, what am I doing here?” Ronnie said aloud to herself, softly, rhetorically, but Claire answered.

  “Looking for an answer. What’s happening to you, how can you stop it? I was a teacher. I wanted to live a responsible life. And this is what happened to me. If you read about these things, if you’re possessed, completely, you’re not functioning, Satan takes you over entirely. What I was, what you are, is a form of possession they call ‘obsessed,’ where you still function, but he gets into you.”

  “Yes, I know the distinction,” Ronnie said.

  “A complete possession is the easy one. Because you’re taken over, you’re not really conscious of what’s happening to you. But obsession, that’s the true act of cruelty, when you’re aware of your torture and not able to do anything about it. It’s satanic in its cruelty.”

  “I’ve been seeing a psychotherapist who feels everything can be explained.”

  “Then why are you here? Too much of a coincidence, the two of us? Be interesting how many others there’ve been like us. Maybe some of them killed themselves. I should consider myself fortunate.”

  “Could I ask, please—how is it that you’re here?”

  “It happened very quickly. I was going along, with the various signs of obsession that you know very well by now building in me. I was confused, not knowing what was happening to me; functioning, not normally, but not where you’d have to send me to a place like this. And then it accelerated. Satan himself appeared when I was awake. I didn’t know where or when he was going to show up next. All this while, Satan, in his human form, was inhabiting my real world. First one Satan, then the other, and I couldn’t keep everything together. Eventually, I just couldn’t function.”

  “Satan in his human form?”

  “When he assumes the aspect of a human being.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Part of his guile, his evil. First he uses your body, which he can only do if he appears to be real. And then he works on your mind. That’s what he’s really after, I believe, to destroy your mind, which is infinitely more cruel. He must think of you as virtuous.” She was still for a moment, reflective. “The evil angel appears to me from time to time, just to make sure I stay here.” Changing moods, she said, “The sex is fantastic, isn’t it, with our Raymond?”

  “Raymond?”

  “Aren’t you seeing someone; talk, dark, handsome, fantastic sex?”

  Ronnie couldn’t bring herself to answer at first.

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “I knew that. Goes with everything else. Raymond Scott. Also known as Satan.”

  “I don’t follow …”

  Claire opened her pocketbook.

  “We were in a club and a photographer wanted to take a photograph of the two of us. Raymond didn’t want that. How can you be sleeping with someone and not have a picture of the two of you? So I had a friend take one secretly when we were on the street.”

  She removed the photograph and showed it to Ronnie. It was a younger version of Claire. She was with a man who looked exactly like Richard. Ronnie stared at it, astonished.

  “He looks just like the man I’m seeing. But his name is Richard Smith,” she said, her heart racing.

  “Smith, Scott, Satan.”

  “You’re saying this man was Satan in human form?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “I know now. I didn’t know then. His behavior: itinerant, unreliable, drawing me in, letting me out, using sex to hold me in place, playing cat and mouse; and the books he gave me to read, rare books with drawings of Satan, powerful images that embedded themselves in my mind, found their way into my dreams, until I was drawing them, seeing them, and he was doing this to me, working on me, finding the weakness in my mental state and breaking me down.”

  “What did he do for a living, Raymond Scott?”

  “He was a Satan scholar. He lectured on Satan.” Claire suddenly noticed something behind Ronnie. “No!” she gasped. “No!”

  Ronnie turned. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “He’s back. Satan is back.”

  “Where?”

  “Right there. He’s grinning at me.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  She started to run awkwardly, heavily, toward the main building.

  “Claire!” Ronnie ran after her.

  While running, Claire looked back apprehensively to the place where she said Satan appeared to her. She stopped. “He’s gone now.” The woman looked forlorn; the bad thing had happened again. “Talking like this, it isn’t good for me.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Out of compassion Ronnie kissed her gently on the cheek.

  With compassion of her own, Claire said, “Be the mouse that gets away.”

  On the trip back to the city Ronnie’s mind was so flooded with bits and pieces of the conversatio
n with Claire Reilly, she thought, ruefully, she didn’t even have room for her own sighting of Satan. She wrote down everything she could remember of the meeting and when Nancy entered the apartment Ronnie overwhelmed her with a report.

  “Whoa. You’re saying Richard was with this woman twenty years ago?”

  “It looked exactly like him, and he was a lecturer on Satan, and the things she described, how he manipulated her, planted images of Satan with her, how he came, went. It’s describing Richard.”

  “And he’s Satan in human form? Ronnie? Could we just settle on he’s a really bad guy?”

  “This woman, she knew it all, the whole relationship with Richard. Maybe Satan does exist. The old argument, if innate good exists, innate evil can exist. And if innate evil can exist, it can … materialize, as an evil angel, as an evil person. I am so messed up. I am so messed up,” and she began to cry, a deep, heaving cry. Nancy put her arms around her.

  “Easy, girlfriend, easy. It’ll be better. You got yourself out of the book. Next, you’ll be out of this guy. And little by little you’ll be yourself. You have to be yourself, Ronnie, you have to,” and then Nancy, too, began to weep, and they held each other.

  “Crazy people look in my eyes and they see something. I’ve been having absolute signs of possession, Nancy.”

  “It’s the book. It’s got you totally screwed up, like you’re living out your research.”

  “I went on Google. Nothing for a Raymond Scott. Is it possible he is the same person, Richard is Raymond Scott? But he hasn’t aged. There’s got to be like some Dorian Gray portrait turning old somewhere. This is so weird. I’m in something so weird.”

  “He’s weird. And if this is his pattern, and he changes his name, and manipulates women, he’s a goddamn sociopath. Even if he isn’t Raymond Scott, he’s still a terrible, terrible guy. You have dated the worst guy ever.”

  “I’m beginning to think he isn’t for me,” she said, deadpan.

  She dialed his cell phone and left a message. “Richard, it’s Ronnie. Most important you call me.” She went to her computer and e-mailed him the same message.

  “What we need are spareribs,” Nancy announced.