"It-"
"Yes?"
"It almost seems to-mock me."
"Mock you?"
She nodded. "Like, ', you did all that, seduced that guy, dumped on him, and now you're just the same as always. You wanted it to change you and it didn't."
" She turned to him. "Does that make any sense?"
"I think it does." Dr. Z spoke slowly. "It's a reference to your mask.
Like those."
He pointed at a grouping of African masks made of ebony and embellished with savanna grass. One in particular had always fascinated Gelsey.
Although a single mask, it offered two nearly identical carved faces.
The cheeks of each were puffed, the eyes were slits, the mouths were open as if for whistling.
"You want to be like Dorian Gray-looking at his portrait, seeing the evil in himself. But your mirror refuses to show your bad side to you.
Which means, of course, that you refuse to see it."
Well, she had to admit, she rather liked that view of things. It explained the mockery she felt when she gazed into her own eyes after taking down a mark. The problem was that Dr. Zimmerman had no idea of what she actually did. She had told him she went to bars, picked up strange men, went home with them, had sex with them, then slipped out without a word while they slept. She had never told him what she really did to them, that she never had sex with them although she always made them think she would-how, instead, she fed them KO drops, then stripped them, searched them, robbed them, uncovered their secrets, left behind a display of power, even wrote them messages in mirror-reverse on their chests.
"You haven't talked about the maze in a while," Dr. Z said, changing tone, indicating he wanted to start along a different tack. "You told me your father built it. But I've never been quite sure why or for whom."
"He built it for himself." She paused. "For us."
"Your family?"
"Maybe for just the two of us," she said.
"Do you think of it as his legacy?"
"It was all he left me."
"I didn't mean that way."
"Well, sure, it kind of sums him up. I mean, it's got all his traits."
"Please explain."
"It's slick and complicated. You can get lost in it. It draws you in. He was a charmer that way." Dr. Zimmerman nodded. "It's cruel, too," she added.
"How is it cruel?"
"The way it confuses you, drives you nuts. A maze is a fiendish thing."
"I'm sure it is. Sounds like he used it to express his aggression."
"I think so," Gelsey agreed. "It also makes you look funny. Actually, it makes you look like shit. The Corridor of Distortion-that really takes you apart. Someone with a body-image problem wouldn't be able to take it. And the Fragmentation Serpent-that breaks you into little pieces."
Dr. Zimmerman was silent. She glanced at him. He was staring intently at a Melanesian mask, one with huge eyes and a grotesque looped nose. She had touched it once when he had gone out of the room. A film of oily soot had stained her hand.
"Why have you stopped, Gelsey?" he asked softly.
"You want more?"
"Have you more to give?"
She shook her head. She knew what he was waiting for, and she knew that if she started talking about it she would end up sobbing like a little girl. Dammit' I Why doesn't he have a mirror in here? If she could only look at herself, she could-what? Escape?
"Escape," she said.
"Escape-yes. Go on.
"My mother would lock me down there when I was bad. As a punishment.
"You can just be with yourself awhile,' she'd say. You know what happens?"
"Tell me?"
"Locked up with weird images of yourself-after a while you forget what you look like."
"Yes, I can imagine." Dr. Z changed position in his chair. "And then, perhaps, you would need to keep looking into mirrors to reassure yourself that you still were you." He shook his head. "But I think there was more to your parents' cruelty. Locking you up down there wasn't the worst they could inflict. Your father, for instance-"
She felt sweat on her forehead. Suddenly she wanted to run away-jump out of her chair, bolt out of Dr. Z's consulting room, rush out of the building into the open air.
"I know what you want. You want me to talk about playtime." Dr. Z was silent. "I don't feel like it today."
"That's all right," he said kindly.
"I wonder-"
"Yes?" I "-if I want to come back anymore." The words leaped out of her mouth as if of their own accord. When she heard them she was shocked.
She turned to Dr. Zimmerman to see if he was surprised.
"Quit therapy?" he asked. He didn't look upset. "Yeah-I guess that's what I meant."
"That's one way to handle it, isn't it?"
"You think I want to run away from the truth?" He shook his head. "What do you think?"