Psycho Summer

There are hundreds of demons, somewhere behind me. They're creeping closer, and whispering, chattering. But I can't move.

I know they're there, and if I could just lift my arm, I think I might scare them away. But they're mocking me, hissing and singing and shouting.

I'm lying on the floor in the hall outside my parents' bedroom in the big old house on Parker Avenue in Buffalo. The ceiling is high, high over head; the baseboards are so tall that I can't see the Victorian wallpaper I know is above them, stretching twelve feet up to the ceiling. 

I can hear the faint sound of something, someone, walking overhead in the third floor bedroom. But no one is up there--those rooms are empty, save for a thick layer of dust, some old clothing and unused furniture. The footsteps move along the hall above me toward the stairs, stepping, sliding, halting, moving. And I can't move.

I'm trying to shout to my parents, to call them, but the tall oak door to their bedroom remains firmly closed. The chandelier above the landing floats overhead, but it's dark, and no one seems to be here in the hall but me and the demons. I can see the black lacquer push button light switch on the wall, one that I've pushed a hundred, a thousand times, watching the flame bulbs come to life.

Why do I feel a pillow under my head? Why do I know if I could just move my arm I could silence the demons? They're creeping closer and closer, all their voices blending in an unholy song of my doom. I can't move.

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"You'll love it," he assured me, his excitement contagious as we glimpsed the skyline of Boston.

"Ok," I agreed. "It seems to have done a world of good for you."

Alex was a small, muscular man, his dark hair, as I had suspected from his photos, a toupee. Still, even with the misgiving bell gonging faintly in my subconscious--seriously, you want to date a man who wears a rug?--I'd agreed to go with him to meet his alternative stretching therapist. With a bad back and a history of headaches, I was typically game for anything that promised to help make me "feel better."

And Alex had certainly changed from the closed in, by-the-book Evangelical I'd met online to a more accessible, easy-going, and finally, it seemed, ready-to-engage man who was now driving me into Boston.

Several weeks earlier, Alex and I, with four years of online chatting, sparring phone calls, and a couple of failed relationships fading in my personal rear-view mirror, had agreed to meet.

He had been waiting for me when I arrived at the small, kitsch-on-the-Hudson restaurant. He was nursing a tall, spicy-looking Bloody Mary, glancing around with what I hoped was nervous anticipation when I arrived, fashionably five minutes late, and slightly sweaty from my walk to the restaurant on the unseasonably hot early summer evening.

His eyes lit up when he saw me. I know that look. I've seen it a lot. Sometimes I like it when I see it; most times I sigh inwardly and think, aw, no. What do I do to be friendly but not encouraging?

He jumped out of his chair at the trendy high table and grabbed me for a hug. "After all this time, a hug is ok, right?" he said.

"Of course," I smiled, fretting that I was damp and he might take it for nerves. He had a nice smile, too. Very Roman looking, I decided. Dark green eyes, olive complexion, a large but artfully carved nose, and a sensual mouth. And he exuded studied self-confidence. A self-assessed Alpha male, I decided. Oh, hell. The type that always spelled trouble for me.

I sat across from him, with the odd, insecure self-assurance of an attractive woman who had grown into beauty late. White pants and a salmon top, long shining dark brown hair, and my bright blue eyes. I'd still look in the mirror with surprise, and wondered who was looking back at me. It wasn't ego, but fascination, that kept me staring at my own image sometimes. Disbelief.

An awkward young girl with books under her arm was being walked home by the man down the street after she'd babysat his children.  His wife had been curt to her when she paid her, and grilled the girl about what the children had eaten for dinner, and when they'd gone to bed, and why the dishes weren't put away.

She objected when her husband said he'd walk the girl home rather than drive her, but it was only a few blocks, and it was a warm summer night. So she gave him an unreadable look, and shut the door hard when they left.

"Sorry," he'd muttered, as they headed down the street.

"It's ok," mumbled the girl. "The kids were fine."

"Have you ever been alone with a man?" he asked, suddenly. He stopped under a streetlight, the light splashing on the ground in the negative pattern of the leaves it shone through. The girl halted, uncertain and with a strange lurch in her stomach, a giddy, frightened, roller coaster of yes and no carrying her from moment to moment. He reached up and put a tentative finger under her chin, running it down to her collar bone.

"My dad," she finally said.

"Of course," he said, taking both her hand and pity on her. He walked her home the rest of the way, chatting about things she never remembered. The summer night air was sweet, a breeze of soft air, a dog barking in the distance, cicadas singing in swells of warm-night music.

Reaching her door, he looked at her for a long moment, and said good night. She ran upstairs to her room and went straight to the mirror, looking for the freckled, chubby little girl she knew so well, studying her image, and realizing with a shock, profound, delightful, and horrifying, that she had, without knowing when or how, become a beautiful girl.

She never babysat for that family again.

Mr. I'm-An-Alpha-Male offered me a drink, and I said I thought his Bloody Mary looked good. It came with both a straw and a stalk of celery to play with, letting me practice the art of lowered eyelids, sudden eye contact, a smile, and a slow seduction.

"So, tell me about this stretching," I said, twirling the celery in my over-sized glass. Alex had told me that he'd been seeing a guy in Boston who'd created a method of resisted stretching that had phenomenal physical results, and also "opened you up" where you had been shut down, or closed off.

He was certainly the model of shut down and closed off, from what I remembered of our online interactions four years earlier. "Looking for the company of one," he'd written in his dating profile, "to share activities, interests, and more." Later, after dozens of hours-long phone calls, instant messages, and open flirtation, he'd spun that into a backward dance of "I said I just wanted company. I'm not ready to date."

When he'd suggested we actually meet, after off-and-on bouts of toe-in-the-water interaction, curiosity got the better of me, and coincidence put us both in the same general vicinity on the same weekend. Could a drink and a conversation actually hurt? So here we were.

And there, of course, it was. That slow, liquid pull at whatever it is inside us that draws us toward this person over that one. The touching of glances, the hands almost brushing, the momentary halt in inane chatter that says, "yeah, he's feeling it, too."

"Here, it's easier if I show you," he said, reaching for my hand. "Put your elbow up on the table. Okay, now, I'm going to pull your arm toward me, and you resist, but let me pull it." He took my hand in one of his, and braced my elbow on the granite table top with the other. "So by you resisting," he explained, "you actually get more stretch. It seems counter-intuitive, but it works." We repeated the action a few times. "How does that feel?"

"Good," I said. "Different."

Two drinks later, we were kissing on the street outside the restaurant.

"Is there somewhere we can go?" he breathed into my mouth.

"There's a park on the river," I said. "Where's your car?"

A warm summer evening, the Hudson River flowing past, the late sun casting a golden haze on everything not already hazy with first contact lust. We talked, and flirted, and touched, and kissed. My hand pressed flat on his chest, I could feel strong muscles under the cotton of his preppy, blue and white checked shirt. My other hand rested on the back of his neck, just below the hairline.

"But that is a hairpiece," I told myself, a piece of me, My Critic, standing back and watching the entire exchange. That part said, "Ok, enough. Time to go home now. This is a good place to say goodnight." And the other piece of me dipped one more time, another time, a third, into the temptation of attraction and first kisses.
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The cat is on the bed, twirling, spitting, and hissing. The spitting and hissing aren't so bad, but it is the mad twirling that was making my heart pound. Spinning and twisting and contorting, she is a ball of madness inches away from my hand. And I cannot move.

"She's possessed," I realize. "It's not my cat, it's a demon. It's a creature." If I can shoo her off the bed, or move away, I will be safe. But I can not move.

And then I realize she is under the blankets, not on top of them as I'd first thought. She is in here, with me. And if she touches me, I am doomed. The demon will jump from the cat into me, and I cannot stop it. And still she spins, and rolls, her hissing now a snarling, a roaring, a screech. I want to cover my ears, to hide my head under the pillow, but I cannot move.
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When it proved harder to find a way to make a second rendezvous, My Critic got louder and more vehement. "This isn't good," she said. "This isn't how it's supposed to go. He should have wanted to see you right away."

Still, he wanted me to come to Boston to visit the studio and meet his mentor, Rob. I had the book Rob had written, A Lifetime of Flexibility. It seemed to be bits and pieces of many things: a bit of standard stretching, some Reflexology, more than a small helping of traditional Chinese medicine, and a smattering of the personality-typing Enneagram, all stewed up together with a huge seasoning of ego. It seems Rob can, according to Rob, heal all wounds, cure the lame, the halt, the blind, and make your life happy, prosperous, and satisfying to boot. Whatever is amiss, there is a stretch for it.

But it's more than that. He also can tell you everything about yourself merely by looking at you.

"I'm a Large Intestine," Alex told me, proudly, as if that Explained Life, the Universe, and Everything. "We can be domineering, but we're born leaders. I'm just hoping you're a Lung."

"Why?"

"That's my balancing type. You can only be truly happy with your balancing type," he explained.

"You don't really buy this, do you?" I asked, incredulous. I admit it, I've never been happy to be stuck in a box that tells you why you're the way you are. Astrology, social styles, Myers-Briggs: to me they're articles in Cosmopolitan magazine, aimed at weak minds disappointed in love. If you can just figure yourself and everybody else out, put them in the right container, you'll find your soul mate and live happily ever after. Right.

"I showed him your picture," Alex told me. I was wandering the house, as I usually did when on the phone, picking things up, dusting, organizing the happy clutter that was my house--projects halfway completed, books everywhere, mementos and oddities that had a story. "He says you're either a Lung or a Small Intestine."

"What happens if I'm a Small Intestine? Do I have to go away?" I was teasing, but I realized, dimly, and with dismay, that Alex wasn't.

"You'll get sick a lot," he said, with real concern in his voice. "Large Intestines have that effect on Small Intestines."

"It sounds a little icky," I said, still trying to have some fun with the subject. I'd read Rob's theories about personality types, and frankly had a hard time following the mumbo-jumbo. Astrology made a lot more sense, and at least the Myers-Briggs ratings let you answer some questions before it drops you into a personality category. In the Rob Theory, he and he alone could look at you and tell you what meridian (that's the Traditional Chinese Medicine part) dominated your personality. "I don't want to be an intestine. Anyway, nobody ever types me very well. I'm right in the middle of the Myers-Briggs, they don't know what I am. They tried to do my colors once, and I don't fit their patterns." Yes, ok, I was a little proud of that fact.

When I'd first started talking to Alex, he was deeply interested in the Sanguine-Choleric-Melancholic-Phelgmatic system of typing people. I figured this was a by-product of his recent divorce. I could remember trying to find answers, too, to questions that simply had no answers, unable to face the random cruelty of life. Why me? I'd wanted to know. Now I knew the answer was simple: Why not you? It was your turn for the Cosmic Tumblers to hit, for good or for ill.

"I wish it were that simple," I said. "I think relationships are more like timing and a lot of hard work."

"Don't you feel a change in me?" he said, and I leapt at the flirtation in his voice, happy to be onto a subject that was much more attractive to me.

"Yes," I answered. "You're definitely less defensive, for sure." Our first, earlier round of communication had ended badly, with me suggesting somewhat enthusiastically that he had no f'ing business on a dating site if he didn't really want to date. He tried to demonstrate how he hadn't really said he wanted a date but the "company of one." "Oh, sure," I'd sneered. "Like anybody is going to reach that conclusion. Puh-leeze."
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The rocking chair is in a pool of yellow light, but lurid, not warm and friendly yellow light. There is no one visible in it, but I know they're there. The rocker is rocking. All around the bowl of light is blackness, and the voices are there, the words just out of reach. They're luring me into the attic where the rocker is sitting, rocking, empty. 

I want to close the door, the door right next to my bed in my third floor bedroom. My room is down a long hall from the back stairs leading to the rest of the family and safety. I know that if I step toward the rocker, the demon will be on me and I will be doomed. Maybe I'll be in the rocker, rocking endlessly in the dark, while the voices rise and fall around me, babbling their sobbing, greedy prayers.

I want to leap from the bed, and run down the painted boards of that long, long hallway, past the other silent rooms, down the stairs to the small landing, and finally down the last ten steps to safety. But I can't move.
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By the time we were on the Mass Pike heading into downtown Boston, we'd had a long weekend at a bed and breakfast in the Catskills, mostly the bed part. He decided that he was ready for a real try at a relationship, and I was the lucky girl. Well, he didn't say that, but that was the deal. What he meant, and I suppose I knew it somewhere in my infatuated mind, was that he was ready for sex.

Me, too. But naturally, being a certain type of girl, it was supposed to be in the context of something more. And, being a not-very-savvy girl, I saw Relationship in even the smallest gestures and glances. I had never learned the fine art of The Lists, that talent some women have for tossing their scarf to a Knight Gallant, and demanding that he joust for the honor of her favors, that he prove himself first.

Still, he was interested enough to be concerned about my health, if not welfare, and as I watched the beautiful Boston skyline take shape in the summer haze, he enthused about the magic of flexibility and stretching.

"He's worked on some really famous people," he told me. "Olympic athletes, singers, actors. He cured himself when he was half dead."

"How do you mean?"

"He was hit by a car, oh, like twenty years ago, and he could hardly walk. So he figured all this out to heal himself. You should see him. Sixty years old and he looks twenty years younger."

"Amazing."

I wouldn't have said twenty years younger. I might not even have said younger at all, when I finally beheld the Master. He looked like a skinny sixty year old to me, with a slight overbite and an undisguised fatuousness.

The studio was an airy second floor former apartment, or more likely two apartments joined into a large two room space with a crystal chandelier, galley kitchen, and huge windows fronting on Boyleston Street.

A pile of shoes was haphazardly stacked at the door, and the place smelled of vitamins and some sort of way-too-healthy food. It appeared that not only was there a dress code--yoga pants, running shirts, and sports socks--but trainers and trainees alike were free to cook odd combinations of spinach, tofu, beans and grains with peculiar names I'd never heard of. I think if someone had walked in with a McDonald's bag, half the group would have passed out, and the other half would have taken their hand-thrown, no-lead mugs to the evil-eater's head.

After changing--I felt a little conspicuous as I was barefoot and in shorts--I was introduced to a few of the trainers, including the one assigned to me. Mats, towels, McKenzie rolls, stools, strange medieval-looking apparatuses, and, oddly, walkers were positioned all around the two rooms, as well as throw rugs of all colors and sizes cushioning the floor. I later learned that all of these were used to help contort the trainee's body in unnatural positions so that the appropriate meridian could be tortured.

I was sitting on the floor chatting with Alex and my trainer when the Great Man finally acknowledged me and walked over to be introduced. Perhaps introduced isn't quite the right way to describe what amounted to a semi-comic monologue that he launched into, with an occasional reference to me. "I don't know, I was going to say Lung, but look at her eyes, that's fear. That thing she's doing with her eyes, what do you think, Manuel? Small intestine?" he said, still not addressing me directly. I thought maybe it was amazement rather than fear, but he may have been more right than even I knew at the time.

He seemed frustrated, and that pleased me in a perverse sort of way. The rest of the chat was about him, and how he had stood on a billionaire's desk to demonstrate to the VC man how flexible he was while at a fund-raising meeting. The billionaire had evidently had the audacity to wonder how he could be sure that buying into an expansion plan His Highness had for the studio was a worthwhile investment, so Rob had figured stepping gracefully up onto the guy's desk was a good way to show him the results of the program.
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The wolf stood in the light of the streetlamp just outside the house. I could see it, sitting, staring at the house through the window on the side of the house on Parker Avenue. 

I was standing by the front door. It was one of those Victorian doors - big, and thick, with a full pane of glass on the top half of the door, and ornate brass handle, and squares of stained glass surrounding the central, lightly frosted pane. 

I thought if I could pull the shade to the front door window, the wolf wouldn't see me, but I couldn't move.

Now he was pacing, trotting a few steps to the right, a few to the left, staying within the circle of yellow light cast by the balloon-shaped streetlamp atop the ribbed green pillar. The night was quiet, and no cars moved up and down the street. Leaves moved gently in what seemed to be a warm summer breeze. If I could move away from the door, or even check to be sure it was locked, I would be safe, I was sure. But I could not move.

There was just one light on in the living room - a desk lamp with a blue glass shade, and most of the room was in shadow, and I could make out hulking shapes of furniture. Maybe if I could push a chair in front of the door, I would be safe. But I could not move. 

I looked to the side window again, and the wolf was gone. The pool of light under the street lamp was empty. Before I could look back to the front door, I heard the shattering of glass as the wolf crashed through the front door to leap on me. But I could not move.
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"There is a cult quality about all this," I said to Rob. "I mean, you're the man. Everybody listens to you, follows you, imitates you."

Rob flared. "This is not a cult. For one thing, I don't sleep with my female students."

I thought that was an odd way to put it, but I was listening intently while I was being stretched. Rob had a covey of acolytes at his feet, and he was explaining why his flexibility movement was not a cult. This was sort of my fault, as I had mentioned to him I saw the parallels between his typing system and the Enneagram's. That had launched a rant on his days spent in an Enneagram community, which really amounted to a cult, and how he had seen through it and been able to escape, and destroy the cult, and that the Enneagram was all bullshit.

I did notice, though, how everyone adopted certain ways of talking, sitting, dressing--all emulating Rob. How nobody talked to Rob as an equal. Except, of course, me, which seemed to be my first mistake. They simply listened when he went into one of his routines--it turns out he had been an actor in another incarnation--but nobody just chatted with him casually, or asked him questions, or volunteered knowledge that he had not imparted to them. Oops. I was not supposed to know about the Enneagram.

I left the studio feeling, admittedly, better. Lighter. Later, I realized, it was the same sort of "light" you feel when you do that trick as a child: stand in a doorway and press the backs of your hands as hard as you can against the doorframe for a minute. Then step out of the doorway, and your arms will "magically" rise up of their own accord. It's simply your muscles continuing to do what they've been doing, which gives the illusion of effortless movement. The same sort of thing is going on with resisted stretching. You're pushing your muscles against an opposing force, over and over. When you finally stand up, you feel lighter, you stand taller, you bounce around. It's a good feeling, there's no denying.

"So, how do you feel?" Alex wanted to know, as soon as we were in the car and on our way back to Worcester, where he lived.

"Good," I said, wanting to make him happy.

"You should have seen yourself," he chortled. "You were bouncing around. That's the way most people react."

"It's different, that's for sure," I agreed. "But Rob's a little strange. He didn't seem happy that I don't have a type."

"Oh, he'll figure it out. Everybody has a type, some people are just a little harder to pin down. He's got you as switching back and forth between a lung and a small intestine, or maybe a stomach."

"Yum."

"But he did say if you stay with me you'll get sick."

"Of course," I said, not bothering to hide my sarcasm.

"He said my ex is my balancing type, but that she has abuse somewhere in her past. He says he can help her,  but it will take a while."

"So, he's not really liking you and me being together, is he? Did it ever occur to you that maybe he likes you?"

"Oh come on," Alex didn't like that one bit. "Of course not. I'm his friend, he likes me, but not like that."

"Ok." Yeah, right.

The ride back to Worcester was quiet.
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I am looking up at bushes along a forest path. I must be quite small, I realize. Bees and birds appear huge. I can see them overhead. But more than that, I realize. I can understand them. They are speaking, and I know what they're saying. It's mostly just chatter, but they fall silent as the bushes to my right begin to shake.

From out of the bushes comes a magnificent, huge ram. He is covered in deep, rich fleece, brilliant white with flecks of gold. He shimmers in the dappled light of the forest.

His horns are long, and curved, and sharp, and I am afraid of him. I want to move aside so that he doesn't step on me, or push me away with those horns. But I cannot move.

And suddenly a huge, booming, echoing voice calls out, filling the spaces between the leaves and halting the butterflies in mid-flight. It is sound and not-sound, all at once.

"THIS IS MY SON!" It insists. It demands. And I cannot run, or hide, or even close my eyes. "THIS IS MY SON!"
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I refused to admit to Alex, after several months of us being together, and several visits to the studio, that my headaches were getting more frequent. If I told him that, he'd say that Rob was right, and that he's causing it. And I'd have to admit that Rob is doing me no good, and that would disappoint him, because he seemed so invested in Rob's ability to heal people.


I'd done my best to work on Alex about the goofy side to all this--the personality typing thing, and the miracle cures for all your psychological problems.

"I'm not totally opposed to the idea that there are archetypes," I explained. "Jung had a system, I used to teach a couple of them when I was in the training business. I think they've got some useful features, you know, helping us understanding basic components of our personalities. But come on, we're all the result of our experiences, and everybody's experiences are different."

"He said you'd say that," Alex smirked.

So the day in the studio when Rob told me I had demons, which is why I haven't been cured yet, I hoped that he was kidding, but I was pretty sure that he wasn't. Still, I treated it as humor.

"Oh, really?" I smiled. "And what do you do about demons?"

"My demon is bigger than yours." Rob said, looking pointedly at me, with not a trace of humor or friendliness. "My demon will beat the shit out of yours."

"Ok," I said, looking over at Alex to see what his reaction was. I'd become more than a little discouraged about Alex--he loved me, he said. We had progressed to "boyfriend-girlfriend," we had unio mystica sex, but he continued to be skittish, and My Critic continued to natter at me.

"He whines," she said. "When he doesn't get his way he literally whines. Not very manly."

"He's never just happy," she warned me. "There's always something not quite right."

"He's constantly pushing you to follow his master plan," she sighed. "He's got to be in charge, and he just won't let things rest."

"And worst of all," she objected, "he says, 'Thank you for sharing that with me,' when you say something that begs for a real response."

So this time the drive back to Worcester was me wanting to know how Alex felt about the demon comment.

"You're supposed to be a Christian," I said. "Do you think he really believes that people have demons?"

"Well, demons do exist," Alex said. "But I don't think he meant demons like that. I think he meant there's more going on with you that you admit."

"Really? Like what?"

"He said he thought you might have been in an abusive relationship. You have a very tight thymus."

"What, do all women have abuse in their backgrounds in his book? Isn't that what he said about your ex?"

"Well, hers is worse, Rob thinks. But there's something you're not saying."

"I think there's something in everybody's background," I said, more than a little huffy. "I mean, I doubt that there's a girl in the country who hasn't had some sort of weird stuff happen at some point in her life. It's just part of growing up. It all depends on how you take it."

"So what happened to you?"

"Nothing in particular. An uncle wanted to know if I'd had my clothes off in front of a boy. I ran back to where my parents were. End of story. And a boss told me it must have been cold in the room, and looked at my boobs. You know, the nipples. I asked him to say it again, in a really loud voice that other people could hear. He got out of there fast and never said anything out of line again. I don't think I'd call that abuse, exactly. Plus I think I handled it pretty well, don't you?"

"There's more. Rob and Carl can both feel your thymus just won't stretch out."

"Or maybe I just have tight muscles from working on the computer all the time, you think? But anyway, seriously, demons?"

From there we progressed to Alex's Standard Whine: he needed more time with me to know if we had a future. I wasn't prepared to leave my job and home until and unless I had some sort of commitment to commit. We had a stalemate, but neither of us was prepared to wipe the pieces off the chessboard.

"I'm not getting my needs met," Alex drawled, in that unhappy wheedling voice.

"I can't do anything about it," I said, in my "I'm so sick of this conversation" tone. "We're doing the best we can with what we've got, right? This is the situation we're in, that's all."

It was a duet we sang regularly, and I sometimes wondered if it wasn't something we both enjoyed on some perverse and incomprehensible level. It was tension, tension creates emotion, emotion fuels intimacy, or as one crude male in my past would sometimes say, it heightened the orgasm.

I could see my father on the balcony of the house in the woods. He was standing still, not looking at me, not looking at anything. But I knew that he was in trouble, and I needed to get him out of the house.

I tried to call to him, but no sound would come. I looked for stairs to try to reach him, to pull him from the house, but there were no stairs. 

There was a door, and I went through it. It led to a room with two doors, so I opened the second door. That led to another room, again with a second door. The third room had no door, but it did have a mirror. The mirror was fixed in the wall, but it was on hinges. I pushed on it, and it rotated on its axis, so that I could crawl out the opening when it was horizontal. 

I was on the balcony. And now my father was down in the large main room of the rustic house, its vaulted ceiling stretching high above my head. He was still not looking at me, but standing still, and sad, beneath me. I still could not make a sound.

I retraced my steps, through the mirror and the doors, and when I reached the ground floor, he was at the top of the balcony. And I knew there was no time left. I had to leave, I had to get away before the house was destroyed.

I ran, still silent though in my mind I was screaming to him to come away, to get away. And the last thing I saw was him, looking out the window on the balcony level, staring at nothing, a look of unutterable sadness on his face.

The acolytes were all gathered at the foot of the Great Man when Alex and I arrived at the studio that Saturday. We had been in the day before, but Rob was gone on another fund-raising mission, and he was relating his adventure to his people. Evidently, these VC people didn't understand his Awesomeness, either.

"Boundaries," he said. "I knew how to set boundaries when I was five. My parents tried to tell me to do things I didn't want to do, and I'd tell them no, because I knew they were crossing my boundaries."

Alex and I sat with the others, Alex in an armchair, and I on the deep windowsill of the huge front windows, which were open, the hot summer city air barely stirring through them.

"These men had no idea who they were talking to," Rob continued, with his slight lisp and highly animated delivery. "When I told them the names of some of the people I've healed, and the movie stars who are making movies because I cured them, they were shocked. Shocked.  And I said, yeah, that's right, and now it's too late for you because you were too imbecilic to appreciate what we're doing here."

I glanced around me, wondering if I was the only one who found this all a little much.

"You," he said suddenly, breaking into his monologue. It took me more than a moment to realize he meant me. "We can't help you here. Your demons are too powerful. Yeah, that's right, look surprised. I mean you, and no, I'm not talking neuroses. Psychoses," he put the word in neon quotes hanging in the air. "I can't expose my people here to your demons; they aren't equipped for them, and I can't risk their safety."

"Excuse me?" I finally managed.

"And you're draining him," he pointed to Alex, who sat mutely in his chair, his hands clasped in his lap. "He's putting his energy into fighting your demons, and not getting well himself."

I looked at Alex. Silence.

"You might try an exorcism. Or a psychiatrist. I can recommend one to you, but you have to get out of here."

"Ok," I said, standing up and gathering my things. "I forgive you for this," I said, knowing exactly how to infuriate him. "And God bless you."

Infuriate was hardly the word. Apoplectic, maybe. His face got bright red, his small eyes narrowed further. "There is no God," he spat. "You have ten seconds to get out of this studio."

That was eight seconds too many, in my estimation. I reached the street in moments, realizing as I raced down the two flights of stairs that I had no way home--I had driven in with Alex. And Alex wasn't, as I would have expected, on my heels. I paced up and down, expecting him to appear at any moment, his face dark with anger. I waited. The day was wiltingly hot; a man and woman with a baby in a stroller walked by me and smiled. A girl in heels and a short dress pranced by, and I wondered if her feet didn't hurt in her impossibly high heels. A homeless man shambled by in a heavy coat, long pants, and boots, and he smiled, too, and I wondered how he could do that.

Alex finally appeared, and I watched him walking down the street, bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet the way he did when he was stressed, his upper body rigid. I followed him for about a block before finally calling out to him.

We had left the city and were on the Mass Pike before we finally spoke.

"Why didn't you leave with me?" I asked. "That was insanity up there."

"I was trying to smooth the situation over," he said.

"Smooth what situation? The guy is a loony tune. He attacked me, for God's sake."

"He was out of line, but he's trying to help."

"Help?" I squawked. "What if I really was crazy? He might have driven me to jump out the window, or jump on him. That was completely wrong and irresponsible! You don't seriously think I'm psychotic, right? That I have demons?"

"I think he may see something we don't," Alex said.

I am still so angry by the time we get back to his house, I left three times, each time he pulled me back in to continue trying to talk about it. I thought his neighbors must be enjoying the sideshow of me walking to the car with my things, and him trotting after me, asking me not to leave, asking me to talk about it.

I don't know what he wanted from me; I wanted him to apologize, I think. He probably wanted me to say that it was ok, that Rob had a point, and that I needed spiritual intervention. Another stalemate. I'll never know, because after I left the final time, I never spoke to him again.

There are hundreds of demons, somewhere behind me. They're creeping closer, and whispering, chattering.

I know they're there, and if I  just lift my arm, I think I might scare them away. They're mocking me, hissing and singing and shouting in a chorus of horrific sound.

I can see the ceiling high above my head, and I know that my parents are no longer in the room at the end of the hall, that the house is empty except for me and the demons. It's dark, and I also know that if I push the black lacquer button of the light switch, I will scare the demons back into hiding.

But I want more than that, so I pull the pillow out from under my head, and, stretching, stretching my arm over my head,  I slam it down behind me, again and again and again, until the last whisper is quiet, the last chatter is silenced, and there is no sound in the house at all, not even the soft sifting of dust settling back down onto the floor of the long, empty hallway.