"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.
It would be easy to say they are simply acts of vengeance visited by you upon lecherous men, stand-ins for your perverted father, a man you both hated and adored. It would be easy to say that you always go down to the maze first in order to become your mirror-twin, thus making it possible to do these awful things without guilt or loss of self-respect.
Your father made you ' for it'; you are so seductive that these men must ' for it,' too. Your father abused you on rainy days; you feel compelled to do these things on rainy nights. There are other parallels and they are all so clear that I am… just a little bit suspicious. The unconscious does not act with such precision. I believe there is another level of meaning hidden beneath this much-too-regular symmetry. Our task is to find it. I'm not certain yet, but I believe the key lies in the maze. I believe there is more down there than you're telling me, more than you may know yourself This Minotaur, for instance. Who or what is it? Who or what does it represent? You look at yourself in mirrors all the time. Now I think you must ask yourself what exactly you are looking for. To put it another way, you must learn to look beyond your own reflection to something deeper, hidden, perhaps behind the mirrors.
Then, I believe, you will see your real self." He paused. He was looking at the little clock across the room, the clock that told him when a session was finished without his having to glance too obviously at his watch.
"Time is up. You know that as a therapist I don't pass judgment on my patients. But I'd be remiss if I didn't say something to you now-speaking as one most concerned about your welfare. I feel I know you well, Gelsey. I know you have good character. The terrible thing about compulsions is the way they force us to do things we know are wrong. You have a strong moral compass. So, please, my dear-I urge you with all my heart-please follow it."
He stood to signal the session was over. His parting words at the door were simple: "I believe we will look back on this session as having been very important for us both. Next time we will explore the Minotaur-who or what you think you saw in the maze. Perhaps that imaginary creature is the key to your locked-up memories."
When she left, the tears were back in her eyes. They clouded her vision even on the street. Dr. Zimmerman was a wonderful man. She was so fortunate to have found him. He had called her "my dear." He had urged her to be good with all my heart." With such words he had given her a gift to carry through the week. He had given her, she felt, a big dose of love.
The Erica Hawkins Gallery occupied the sixth floor of a renovated loft building near Spring Street on lower Broadway. The building was not in the geographical center of the downtown gallery district, but close enough to justify its aura of self-importance-thick glass doors; austere all white lobby; uniformed security guard; pair of shiny steel freight elevators.
As Gelsey rode up in one that Tuesday morning, the names of the various establishments on the various floors were automatically lit in turn:
Icarus Arts; Sofie Winter Gallery; Jeremiah Bones Art Books; Tannhauser Gallery; 1. 1. Sing; and, at the top, Erica Hawkins.
The elevator door opened directly onto the gallery floor, where Erica and her young assistants, Dakota Hutchins and Justin Barrett, were busy arranging sculptures for an exhibition. A willowy young woman, nearly six feet tall, wearing dark glasses and dressed in tight black leather pants and a black T-shirt overlaid with a black leather vest, stood to one side watching. Gelsey recognized her as Jodie Graves, the artist whose work was being mounted.
"Gelsey!"
Erica came toward her, arms wide to embrace. She was a large, rotund, gray-haired woman with a booming voice and a maternal smile. Impossible, Gelsey thought, to discern Erica's character from her looks. The gallery owner, for all her fostering of young artists, was a steel-hard businesswoman and a militant, occasionally raging radical feminist.
Erica wrapped her arms around Gelsey and squeezed her to her bosom.
"The new painting-I adore it!" She whispered in Gelsey's ear: "If I don't flatter Jodie a little more she'll go into a snit. Wait in my office. Be with you in a flash."
Dakota and Justin waved and there was a curt nod of acknowledgment from Jodie, the kind of nod an athlete might give a rival before a race.