A lost look came into her eyes. She shifted as far from me as the booth would allow. When she spoke again, her voice was even softer, but deeper, almost masculine.
“You are acting like vermin animal, young lady. You are going to live like vermin animal and you will end up dying like vermin animal. And then he’d go into these detailed descriptions of how vermin lived and died and how no one loved them and gave them good love because they didn’t deserve it and how the only thing they deserved was bad love and filth and humiliation.”
She reached for her mug. Her hand shook and she braced it with the other one before raising the coffee to her lips.
“He’d keep going like that. Don’t ask me how long because I don’t know–it felt like years. Chanting. Over and over and over. You will get the bad love, you will get the bad love. .. pain, and suffering and loneliness that would never end–prison, where people will rape you and cut you and tie you up so you can’t move. Horrible diseases you will get–he’d go into the symptoms.
Talk about the loneliness, how you’d always be alone. Like a corpse left out in the desert to dry. Like a piece of dirt on some cold, distant planet–he was full of analogies, Dr. B. was, playing loneliness like an instrument. Your life will be as empty and dark as this room we are sitting in, young lady.
Your entire future will be desolate. No good love from anyone–no good love, just bad love, filth, and degradation. Because that is what bad children deserve. A cold, lonely world for children who act like vermin animals. Then he’d show photos. Dead bodies, concentration camp stuff. This is how you will end up!”
She shifted closer.
“He’d just chant it,” she said, touching my cuff. “Like some priest.
..
throwing out these images. Not giving you a chance to speak. He made you feel you were the only bad person in a beautiful world–a shit smear on silk. And you believed him. You believed everyone was changing for the better, learning to control themselves. Everyone was on his side, you were the only piece of shit.”
“Cutting you off,” I said, “so you wouldn’t confide in the other kids.”
“It worked, I never confided in anyone. Later, when I was out of there–years later–I realized it was stupid, I couldn’t have been the only one. I’d seen other kids go into the rooms–it seems so ridiculously logical now. But back then, I couldn’t–he kept focusing me in on myself. On the bad parts of me.
The vermin animal parts.”
“You were isolated right from the beginning. New environment, new routine.”
“Exactly!” she said, squeezing my arm. “I was scared shitless. My parents never told me where we were going, just shoved me in the car and tossed in a suitcase. The whole ride up there, they wouldn’t speak to me. When we got there, they drove through the gates, dumped me in the office, left me there and drove away. Later I found out that’s what he instructed them to do. Have a happy summer, Meredith. ..”
Her eyes got wet. “I’d just repeated seventh grade. Finally faked enough to barely pass and was looking forward to a vacation. I thought summer would be the beach and Lake Arrowhead –we had a cabin, always went there as a family.
They dumped me and went without me. .. no apologies, no explanation.
I thought I’d died and gone to hell–sitting in that office, all those brown uniforms, no one talking to me. Then he came out, smiling like a clown, saying, what a pretty girl you are, telling me to come with him, he’d be taking care of me. I thought: what a jerk, no problem putting it over on him.
The first time I stepped out of line, he let it pass. The second time, he pulled me into a room and bad-loved me. I walked out of there in a semi-coma.
.. blitzed, wasted–it’s hard to explain, but it was almost like dying. Like bad dope–I felt I was on a rocky island in the middle of a storm. This crazy, black, roaring sea, with sharks all around. .