Page 2 of Teddy Bear

The interior is lit by a bright LED light that hurts my eyes a bit. I hate bright, glaring light; I hate adjusting to it.

I sit, already well trained on the plastic chair in the middle of the room, which was originally intended as an observation room, but Danny found a much more creative and better use for it.

Actually, I'm wrong.

That's exactly what Danny is using the room for.

To observe.

Concealed behind the double glass, so that I cannot see the outlines of his perfect, sharp face, freshly shaven and infinitely smooth, with lightning-blue eyes that look everywhere and nowhere, that are on me and in me, that are full of a hundred souls and a hundred voices and that are emptier and deeper than the damned abyss itself, Danny sits, and watches our little show unblinkingly.

Like any good director, like a true kapellmeister conducting his transcendental orchestra of pain, he is quite ready to take the baton into his hands.

-Lizzie, now please follow me. You will only hear my voice...

I hear his voice; it's cold and brash, as commanding as it is defiant, pushing me past my every limit and lighting an unstoppable, angry fire inside me.

I burn with his ringing, exultant voice that, if you only listen closely enough, breaks and cracks at the edges, turning into a leaden blade, a crystal icicle sharp enough to pierce the most tense vein within your beating heart itself and make you shiver with winter, and drown in the burning blood that seeps from your torn arteries.

-Which leads you across...

I imagine him smiling, his full, wide lips slightly and defiantly parting in a smile, shamelessly showing a row of his crooked bottom teeth—I'm fascinated by the very fact that there's a body part that Danny hasn't bothered to perfect.

Who knows, maybe at the end of the day, when he's not playing sick, brain-fucking games that destroy the mind and tear apart the soul, when he's not twisting the brains of his patients and teaching all the miserable wretches of this world how to smile and be socially useful on extreme doses of Valium and Prozac, when he's not watching his best friend's daughter dance semi-naked, hypnotized inside the plastic-rubber safe room of the nuthouse he's in charge of, jerking off his rather swollen and throbbing cock, and Danny, just an imperfect and helpless human being.

The feeling that his eyes are frantically and slightly insanely fixed on me never ceases to give me an irresistible chill.

The kind of chill that I'm so sickly addicted to that I'd do anything just to feel it again.

I turn to one, then to the other, passing all four corners of the room, in which there are small glowing camera eyes, expressionless and making no gesture, not allowing him to revel in my complete loss yet.

To revel in my complete loss of all control, which is inevitable once I step there, into that horrible darkness that crouches inside me and waits for an opportunity to lash out and show its sharp teeth.

Don't worry, doc, your show will start soon; we just need to spice it up a bit first.

I try to determine the exact direction and angle of his gaze, although I know it is pointless and impossible.

Here, Danny is a god, omnipresent and contained in every particle of the meager air I breathe; here he is the all-powerful force that governs and controls my destiny, and leads my every move and act.

-I need...

I speak in a serious, cold voice; the game is months old, and I've learned to play it quite well- not better than him, but just enough to be a worthy and valuable opponent. The worst part is that in the end I don't know who of the two of us wins and who loses.

I guess no one, except the dark nothingness that feeds on our sick, depraved madness, and that sucks us into its destructive, screaming vortex like an unstoppable centrifugal force, spinning our souls at the speed of invisible light, or rather darkness, making us tremble, lustfully hungry for each other and irretrievably lost in our sinful, unattainable desire.

I'm not sure which fact is worse, the fact that I'm his best friend's daughter or the fact that I'm his patient.

Perhaps worst of all, the fact that, if the cards had been dealt just a little differently, if Danny hadn't been armed with an impenetrable shield of endless coldness and steely ambition, and if he'd been a little less able to hide his madness, now he’d be on the same side of the glass as I am, while our fate, behind the magical wall, would be decided by someone entirely different.

But I guess this is what they call fate, the fate of the gods themselves, who do not give us peace, no matter how much we kneel before them.

Gods who have an unbreakable pact to force us on earth and make us pray and crawl as much as possible, so that we can gain what they call mercy, grace, or just plain freedom, to escape from the rotten cage of our mortal bodies into the endless space of the universe, bright and light, like the light of the stars.

And maybe it's a good thing that it's like this, that fate was just like this.

Maybe it's a good thing that Danny is a doctor on the other side of the glass, a morbid doctor who cures his every fantasy on me, because more than anything in this world I long to be his medicine and his little, helpless, hypnotized experiment.

I let my voice bounce off the hollow space of this sweet, stuffy, sterile cage. The cage in which I am only free.