She turned to Dr. Z. Was he titillated by all this? Was there an erection sprouting in his baggy trousers? She didn't look. Better, she decided, not to know. Her thoughts turned to the tired detective she'd seen interviewed on TV, the detective with the searching eyes. The hunter. Her enemy.
"You're angry with me now," Dr. Zimmerman said.
"Yes," she agreed, "a little."
"I think more than a little, Gelsey."
"What do you want me to do? Describe it to you blow-by-blow?" "Were there blows?" he asked gently.
"No!" Now she was angry. "He was sweet about it. Really sweet.
That's what's so maddening. He was tender. He didn't throw me on the floor and… force himself. He always tried to make it..
"What?" "Fun," she said.
She turned to face him. Dr. Z was stretched out in his chair, eyes half-closed, the point of his goatee aimed straight at his shoes.
Perhaps he was trying to imagine what she was describing, not only to visualize it but so he could feel it as well. Perhaps he was being careful not to look at her, out of consideration, so she wouldn't feel ashamed.
"It was mostly with our hands anyway," she said. "We didn't do, you know … the whole thing. He wasn't a beast. He never did anything that hurt me."
"But he did hurt you."
"Yes," she agreed, "he did."
"Did he-?"
She interrupted. "He always wanted me to ask for it. Ask him to do this or that. Whatever. He wouldn't do it unless I asked."
"Did you?" "I asked." It pained her terribly to say it. "I don't know why. I guess I felt I had to. That was part of the game, you see. I would ask and then he'd grant my wish." She paused. "I think I know why he did it that way."
"Why do you think?"
"If I asked for it, that would mean he wasn't doing any thing wrong.
Against my will, you know. It wasn't abuse. It wasn't forced. It was… by consent."
"How does that make you feel?"
"The same way it made me feel then." She knew that very soon she was going to cry.
"Which was?"
"That I really did ask for it. So I had it coming to me, didn't I?"
The tears were welling. "I wish you could understand. It wasn't all that … bad. It really didn't hurt. It was really sweet.
Afterwards I would feel as though I had dreamed it, you know. Like it hadn't really happened. The mirrors made it seem like that. I would watch what we were doing in the mirrors, and it would seem like I was watching other people. Maybe that's why he always wanted to play down there. So I could sort of… float away… "
The tears were streaming down her face now. It felt good to cry, so she didn't bother to wipe them even when Dr. Z offered her a box of tissues.
Crying was better than feeling afraid.
"… float away from it, into mirror space. It's another land, Doc.
Everything's the opposite there. Right is left and vice versa. It wasn't me anymore. It was… the other girl."
"Your twin, your shadow."
"My dream-sister who lives inside the glass." Gelsey snatched up a tissue, wiped her face. "There wasn't just one of her either. There were hundreds. In that particular room-he called it the Great Hall of Infinite Deceptions there were more images than you could count.
Galleries of reflections extending in every direction, each one infinitely long. Of course not infinite. There isn't enough light for that and the mirrors can never be perfectly aligned, so the corridors tend to curve and eventually you lose the image. But you know they're there, continuing forever around the bend. That's the point, that they can go on forever." She turned to him. "It's hard to explain." "I think you explain it very well." Dr. Zimmerman paused. "But I don't think it was all fun and games." "I never said it was!"
"Did he?"
She nodded. "That was the idea, I guess." She paused. "There's something I never told you." She wiped away more tears, then tried to smile.
There're so many things I never told you until today. And other things I probably won't tell you ever. "I sometimes thought I saw something else down there with us-amidst all the images, a creature's face. I'd catch just a flash of it and then it'd disappear.
When I'd ask Dad about it, he'd laugh and say it was just the Minotaur."
"Minotaur-interesting. Was it real? Was someone really there?"
"I guess not. But it seemed so at the time. It scared me. Then this… creature would just disappear, and Dad would comfort me, and then I'd forget."
Dr. Z stroked his little pointed beard. It was getting toward the end of the hour. Gelsey stared at him, waiting to hear what he had to say.
Perhaps he sensed that the time had come to venture an analysis, for he clasped his hands together, a sign that he was going to sum up.
She hoped he wouldn't talk about "shadow-work" and "eating your shadow" again. She needed more than that, something to make her feel less miserable about herself on account of the awful things she did to men.
"You believe you turned to the mirrors to escape the reality of what he was doing to you. But I wonder if there was another reason," Dr. Z said.
"I wonder if you used the mirrors, mirror space as you call it, as a kind of stage to which you could turn and then watch the two of you perform.
"Perform?"
Dr. Z nodded. "Certainly turning to the mirrors was a way to disassociate yourself. It wasn't happening to you, it was happening to your dream-sister in the world of mirrors. With that fantasy you protected yourself from the pain of your father's betrayal and abuse.
But I believe there was You were as much attracted to what he was doing as repelled. This is not unnatural. We often find it in incest cases.
Your father was initiating you into a realm of arcane knowledge, the secret sexual knowledge of adults. You had to be fascinated. You were only twelve but already a sexual being. We know that children much younger than that can have extremely powerful sexual feelings. The point is-you watched. And not just one reflection either. A hundred reflections, a million… images reflected down those infinitely long mirrored corridors. You watched and you imagined and you dreamed that all this was happening to your twin. The mirrors were a theater and you were the audience. Oh, yes, you turned away from him. But you might have chosen to close your eyes. You did not close them. You chose to watch.
That choice was yours." Dr. Zimmerman paused.
"I don't condone your criminal acts, Gelsey. But perhaps I can help you understand them. With understanding, hope- fully, you will stop.