Bebbel likes it.

Sanct.i.ty of Pa.s.sion.

by Daniel Fabiani.

Psychiatry is my dark art of vast and endless capabilities. It mutates exponentially as much as it shrinks my patients' minds into a coercible slack. I wake up most days and have already predetermined the work load. Continual frowns, suicidal tendencies, angst-ridden and adolescent-minded yuppies who have delved so far into the voracious world of superficiality that they cannot dig themselves back is usually what I get. Welcome to the culture of the Upper East Side.

I also specialize in the power of persuasion. If you are reading this, you have broken into my private journal and are now going to read the sticky labyrinth of my thoughts; this is the first entry. I am here to say that I have an unjustifiable and parasitic need of watching feeble-minded people punish themselves to satiate the barbarity of my ways.

My training in the medical field is exquisite. I have received my PhD in psychiatry from an Ivy League inst.i.tution in New York City and I am also a board certified medical doctor. If you were to ever seek help by way of my knowledge, you would see that my office here on the Upper East Side would not spark any sense of morbidity in you, albeit the latter occurs regularly here; my facade is even greater than perfect.

You will find omnipresent accolades hanging on the walls in shining frames and would never think that the nefarious intentions on my client's beaten souls could actually progress here. It just looks too pretty. If you were ever a client of mine (or patient, if you will) you would see that my suite is nothing short of a typical professional plunder.

My building is a cla.s.sic style 1940's edifice with a slight New York City att.i.tude and sneer. Giant translucent windows line the outside like a diamond prism. Sunlight smiles though the gla.s.s and changes the shapes within. No one would ever know what I conduct behind the walls of my building. My staff is completely oblivious to the obliteration I perform onto one's vulnerable subconscious. I can read the human condition like a children's book from the moment a client struts into my office and sprawls their flaccid, depressed limbs upon my black leather lounge chair. I am dutiful master of my execrable practice.

I can easily bend your mind into tangents beyond physical recollection and mold it in ways that you never knew were possible. My abilities can override any person's will power. When a new patient is being treated, my cerulean eyes scrunch innocuously at their sorrows and they soon begin to understand that I am a friend.

You would never know, as my patient, that it would turn out to be a game for my affection when you first walked into my office. You would not be aware that you acquiesce to my mental enslavement as I envelop your thoughts accordingly. l.u.s.ting for me is a common ground, nearly a funeral. My emollient words, the melody of my charm and laughter, the corn silk blonde fur hugging my face-are connections you make, lulled by the tranquility of my voice.

Pleasure groans within you, then soon turns to pain when you are turned away for the day. You never want your session to end. To come to terms with the notion that there is no other person like me out there drives you mad. It will haunt you like the nagging of your most despised in-law, or be culpable for the arguments between you and your lover. You want to be with me forever.

When being treated by me, Dr. Robert Quinn, a patient realizes I become their entire everything. No longer is oxygen or nutrition required as my wheeling words become sufficient enough. After all, these Upper East Siders are quite a sensitive bunch. The very cadence of my sentences crawls through the solidified convolutions of their inept minds. It traverses the dank flaps of their soul, dripping in time with the monotony of their own secret self-hate.

I ma.s.sage my phrases unto their useless sentences and let them seep viscously into the pitiful pulse of their existence. Then the magic starts. I become implored to continue, to pour prescriptions down their throats and offer more caressing words. Within the shriveled essence that was their mind, a patient never regains full knowledge of square one or of why they came to me in the first place. That is when I strike.

Take Catherine Segal for an example, a typical Manhattanite, twenty seven years old, who lived life by the hearts of men. She adored the idea of making them squeal like slaughtered pigs with the dagger of her sweet pink l.a.b.i.a between the milk of her thighs. Enamored over her sacral length hair and the wafting feminine products which she splashed on her body liberally, she finally cracked and realized her life was equivalent to a parasite. Catherine came to me in need of mental stability and inner peace.

I offered her my thoughts and my perception of impotent reality. She wanted something more than just a rudimentary education of my vast experiences and medically trained advice. She was seeking unprovoked affection. When she suctioned me with her sticky glossed lips and pushed me to my expensive lacquered desk, I knew she was the shallowest thing I had ever met.

She straddled me with a fire billowing from the far recesses of her hormones. The coolness of her thighs was washed away by the heat of her womanhood. I could not extinguish it fully. I never wanted anything more from my clients other than to debilitate their will and deplete their funds. I am simply not a s.e.xual creature.

My fingers burned as she bit the tips. She ravaged my suit with her hungry hands and her b.e.s.t.i.a.l and womanly needs. And then the tide turned. I stopped the nonsense, the s.e.xual depravity. I pushed her slow trembling body away from mine and guided her back to the lounge chair. She obsequiously listened to all ideas that sluiced from my strong mouth, but could not be sufficed with the sharp wit of my words. The seemingly endless answers I provided to the questions in her life that she so adamantly believed made her feel overwhelmed.

Catherine's agenda was quite clear after that. She'd visit four days a week during the evening hours and sit haphazardly on my listening chair, and babble on with her incessantly daft issues. My legs would cross and my mouth would halt her words before she could finish with her incessant stories. Warm phrases caressed her will casting persuasion unto her way of thinking. When I finally told her to take off her blouse, she did so without hesitation. She ripped it right from the hot oven that was her torso and pushed up the cleft of her cleavage. I demanded she listen to me forever; she agreed lasciviously. And then I dropped the bomb on her unexpectedly (but more on this material creature in a moment. First, allow me to digress...).

My practice has been skulking in the Upper East Side for just under ten years. My youthful complexion has not faded during that span, rather it has accentuated. My golden, thin eyebrows perfectly arch over the alabaster of my forehead. My eyes could pierce steel and melt egos of rock stars into a lucid gel. If my hands touch your skin, horripilate becomes your friend. My smile is forever long, teeth as clean and gleaming as pearls. They poke through your senses with every stretch of my rose petal lips; the persona that will eventually end up becoming the demon inside you.

I have never thought twice of the mental agony I intrude onto my patients. After all, if I wasn't doing a swell job, would I have any clients? I don't have any back story or any pestiferous upbringing that aided in the choice of turning my clients into jelly-minded fools. I have no one to blame but myself for the perversity of my pa.s.sion, the sanct.i.ty of the marriage between me and death itself and the offering of it to me. Within the haggard minds of the city folk lay the deepest and most surreal form of fragility that the world has ever known: the need for a friend.

Who wants the life of loneliness? Who wants that sought for corner office, that salary raise, and the lackl.u.s.ter a.s.sistant who runs wild for your coffee without someone to share it with? Ladies and gentlemen you have just been introduced to one of the delicacies of psychiatry and the fear of solitude; a lurking loneliness that mocks the human race wildly.

I learned this quickly as my patient load began to bloat with the same d.a.m.n story over and over; life as a loner, successful entrepreneur, unsuccessful lover, and a fascination with the twisted material world. This is as shallow as it gets here on the Upper East Side. Its inhabitants toss money around like it was meant to be rid of. They dabble in the finer side of life and spend slews of cash on that material world they supposedly despise so much, never worrying of the impending greed and narcissism that was destined to backfire on their useless existence.

I always knew these people were a frivolous, snarky bunch. But they all seek me to cure the life of indecency in money, indulgence, and the surrept.i.tious hatred for themselves. The idea of lying in a muddy, mildew-bearded grave in a plot meant only for one rips their sanity to shreds. Loneliness is the best and most malleable weapon. Speaking of which, I now bring you back to one Catherine Segal...

"Here take this," I told Catherine, her eyes as desperate as a puppy starved of its mother's milk.

"What is this, doctor?" She said knowingly.

"Unravel the cloth and find out, my dear."

"I love it when you call me that, Robert." Her face was languid with l.u.s.t, cheekbones high and lips as pink as a baby's gums.

"...It's Doctor, Catherine, let's not forget that."

Catherine quickly unraveled the fine black cloth, revealing a shimmering scalpel. Under my spell, the undefeatable power of coercion, she looked at the freshly fabricated scalpel with not reluctant eyes, but spanning b.a.l.l.s of hazel dancing on the periphery of inquisition. I stood and rubbed my strong hands into the deep tissue of her shoulders and raised her beady vertebrae on the back of her neck. She quivered slightly with the despair I was about to implicate on her.

"Cut me off a piece of your soft, female flesh," I whispered to her, my breath licking the salt of her fear, her penetrable human condition.

"Cut off...what?"

"Use that masterful piece of steel I have just proffered and make me the happiest man you could ever dream."

"I would do anything to make you happy, Robert."

"It's doctor, Catherine, don't make me correct you again."

"I'm sorry, I am just so..."

"Here, let me help you."

By the guiding light of a violet setting sun, my window facing perfectly against the western hemisphere, our arms took on a cast of purple-white as I showed this malleable creature where and what to cut. The medical man within me rived, jumping and drooling at the knowledge that I had turned this patient into my own momentous sanctuary. Her a.s.sent was the devotion I've always lived for. The weak listen to the incandescence of my ingenuity like sheep.

The fragile ingenue little pig was more than welcoming with the accommodation of her body. I explained all the details, mapped out the places that I needed, marked up her sweat-slick skin with my fountain pen. The black ink drew thin tire tracks along the fatty parts of her female frame, smudging a bit from the dampness. I am no murderer you see. My clients are more than happy to snip off a taut pink nipple or completely flay their faces like a prize-winning flounder by which to seek my approval.

And Catherine was no exception. She was ordered to start with her shoulders then follow the line of fountain ink as it strewed across her scapulae-like black thread. She held the scalpel at eye level like an ancient piece of argent, her hazel orbs studying the fine steel like sacred metal. Then I signaled for her to do it, to slice me a crimson sash from shoulder to shoulder, to open her body and reveal to me the pa.s.sion within her; to feel the animalistic and womanly heat and the love she has gained for me.

And as the blade glided across her upper torso, I offered her a drink spiked with just the right dosage of GHB (a date rape drug) to keep her awake, and the only alcohol of her suit, vodka. I used this on Catherine in order to stabilize her mood to enhance my experience. She took the drink, swirling with the thick grains of crushed drugs and swigged it subserviently, oblivious to the cut across her chest and the trickling of blood droplets tunneling down.

My fingers could not help but to crawl across the stream of exquisite red dripping from the parting of her insouciant flesh. As I did so, she grinned wild, unable to thwart the caress as if I had cast upon her the touch of a thousand spiraling o.r.g.a.s.ms. She complied the way that all my clients had, blinded by the inanition from the c.o.c.ktail with confusion and gratification in making me smile. Their minds soon slip to cadavers and they cannot stop the juggernaut effect.

I gently licked her blood away from my greedy fingertips as she continued cutting along the train tracks I had drawn for her; not a wince of pain initiating. Next came her finger, stubby and pale, the nail perfectly polished in its upkeep; one of the many rules of fashion on the Upper East Side. Nothing can be nothing short of immaculate. I was never a finger man, but if Catherine felt the need to castrate her own, then who was I to stop her? I grabbed the red glossed stump and pocketed it in my jacket, hoping to partake of it later. Next came her nipple, all fleeting, cherubic, and tumescent from the dissevering, it melted in my mouth as she offered it for consumption.

I gripped her dank shoulders, slippery with red life and bent in. "Mangle your face a bit for me, honey."

I purred lovingly in her ear, my breath pa.s.sing through the tympanic membrane like a molesting poltergeist would, teasing her brains with pa.s.sion, fervor, and orders. And like the trained animal I had molded her into, the scalpel was now raised with a.s.sail of a tortured soul and sc.r.a.ped across her cheekbones, metal to hardened calcium.

Warm flaps of flesh fell to the floor, piled like frozen globs of cherries. Her self-mutilation was uncontrollable under the spotlight of my words. Moon pale shards of face bone slid down, with nothing but a whimper escaping her useless vocal chords, paralyzed from the c.o.c.ktail of medication.

"Go deeper, give me something special. Give me something I can take with me forever."

"I can't," she said, her strength exhausted.

"You do whatever you need to do to please me."

Catherine glazed my face over with question, falling to the coo of death by loss of blood and loss of vitality. Her meat sack of a face, like a catcher's mitt, was scooped clean of its former capsule of outer beauty. Flaps of skin just hung lax, devoid of nerves, slipping to a slow death from her decaying heart beat. They were steadfast like tadpoles dying on a strip of parched land. I thrived in every moment.

She had idolized me in her final testament. She spilled the words from her lips as she sliced them clean from her face, ripping the kisser off her mouth, I love you. Then she followed the drawings I made to her heart, lifted the reddened scalpel in defiance to her past life: her yearnings for money, men, and power-finally realizing the ba.n.a.lity of her existence-and plunged the fine sparkling steel into her chest.

Her eyes weren't as full of pain as they were release. Her sandy brown eyes soon shifted from a scrunch of delusion, to complete and utter paradise; my own facial expression showing nothing more than the simple pleasures of life. As the sun crawled into a bed of illicit gray clouds bloated with oncoming rain, I licked her clean of her scarlet soul and packed her away in a safe place.

Chuck Hansmith was another one of those young, troubled Upper East Side folk. Raised in New York City by way of the American potato land in the shape of a D, Idaho, he saw things very unclear as my patient. He wanted the greater things in life, the material world wrapped up in small parchment pieces and slowly handed to him for him to savor. What he never knew was that my intention was not to help him heal of his divulgence within the poison of superficiality, but to make him my own. I wanted nothing more than to allow the rages within myself to become enveloped in my innate need for human defamation.

He came to me in dire need of help, hoping for science and intuition to cast that magical spell on him in the form of my psychiatrically trained phrases. I, of course, obliged, with the agreement that he see me and that he told no one of his visits (something I intermittently practiced since I began business in 1999.) The poor and susceptible chap agreed; his colorless eyes ignorant of my perilous intentions.

He had become another one of those sheep that couldn't withstand, nor bare, the great wave of the golden-like apparatus of my hair or my wind blue eyes. Just another one of those unstable Upper East Siders who cannot seem to distinguish life outside of designer clothing and a loathing self-image; my how I loved them! Oh, manipulation! If the entire world was as cowering and made up of imbecilic fibrils like the hot shots of New York City, then I'd have a cure for everyone and I'd never go hungry.

Not only have I pursued a superior career in ending the grievous hearts of my clients, I have also loved the taste of their demise. To fully understand such a simple complexity that is myself and them, the joining of our temporary bond while they were alive, can only be found through the slurp of their body and blood, like the good Lord once said.

Chuck was not excused from my wants and practice. He came to me in need but was not aware of the need that was sp.a.w.ning inside me, the man he had come to for help. His appointments followed a three time a week schedule near to sunset in the winter, about 4:45 p.m. and in the spring at about 7:45 p.m. We went on like this for nearly two years. And in that time I seasoned him with hollow promises of a cure for his self-depressed manic state. But for me it was two years of weaving my impelling words like silken spider webs into the faulted sack of his cognition.

He soon became yet another distilled robot at my disposal. At twenty four years old he was young enough to be coaxed with empty cures, but not yet old enough to grasp my superior vocabulary and meddlesome ways with words. It was all the better in the end because I received my prize, something well earned.

He came to his last appointment around 4:40 pm during this past January. The streets were no longer blotched with sticky black gum, but with slews of chunky rock salt. His attire was ragged as he burst through my door, covered with snow. He had nearly reverted back into his adolescent years as he wore no gear to protect himself from the nasty teeth of old man winter with some yellow in the snow.

"Why is this our last appointment?" Two black and crazed eyes scolded with a lurching mouth and rosy-cheeked face.

"You're near to being cured, Chuck," I said, already reaching for the ensconced scalpel in black silk within my desk drawer.

"But I need you! I am lost without our talks...please Robert."

"My name is Doctor, Mr. Hansmith."

"Doctor Quinn, please!"

Poor little Chuck, as young as spring but as spent as dead autumn leaves. He never knew his last appointment was the spoiled icing to the cake of our two-year affair. This would be his final sacrifice for me and the bond we had created.

"Would you like a drink, Chuck?" I asked.

"Please, Rob-err, Doctor Quinn, tell me why? And yes, I'll take a drink."

I offered Chuck Hansmith my finest concoction. An amber gla.s.s of whiskey with the cloudy remnants of Vicodin and Codeine whirling through the ice cubes as I swirled the spoon in, forever bonding to the structure of ethanol. (One of the perks of having a medical degree is my constant supply of prescription medications). When ingested, the escapade was to be pain free, as well as consciously executed. He took the drink by the dim light of the lamp in the room; his trembling hand something too innocuous to savor.

He chugged without hesitation, my eyes rumbling beneath the sockets as I knew I was going to feast-and feast well. I considered the drugs that I offered to my clients, via alcoholic beverages, as a kind of saccharine baste to their tissues-they always taste sweeter after. I walked to my desk. Chuck's face was beginning to droop a little from the effects of all the mind-bending substances. He finally went silent, probably some sort of defiance to my bidding adieu to our sessions.

I took out the scalpel clothed in silk, handed it to him, as well as set up my feather pen with fresh ink at its tip. I used no words as I traced all the points in his face I wanted him to destroy, to give up for me in order to satisfy my cravings, both hunger and sadism. I marked him up like blueprints, drew thin black lines around the hollow orbs of his eyes, prominent cheekbones, and drooping ear lobes, ending at the soft spot behind them.

Once again he had no words to offer-he kept his entire facial expression bleak and careless, allowing me to do my duty. I opened the silk cloth for him, the texture as smooth as the subcutaneous of our integumentary system. I gently placed the scalpel in his flimsy fingers. He suddenly dropped it to the floor.

"Chuck, my friend, pick that up," I whispered to him.

His vacant eyes flickered, confusion masking his secret need to please me, "I can't, I'm too weak," he mumbled like a day-old drunk.

"You can do it, please. I have faith in you."

"But you never want to see me again," his words ricocheted like that of a spoiled child.

"I'll see you, as long as you listen to me now. Wake up a bit."

Chuck looked at me, a young chicken in my eyes. Tasty, pasty flesh was all I wanted. He took the scalpel when I handed it back to him, sliced his own finger like the vilest of paper cuts and did not even notice. I instructed him further as his mind sunk far into a dune of pity, the feelings of never seeing me again-leading the final moments of his death.

"Let's move onward, Chuck," I chided, unable to control my enthusiasm for his demise.

"What if it hurts?" he asked.

"It will do no such thing."

He nodded his senseless approval. I ordered him to start at the base of his ear lobe, to feel for the soft spot behind it and then dig the blade in a scooping motion. I offered him a small, portable mirror for the occasion and he took it with no malice; hands not quavering, yet blanketed in gooseflesh. I shut all the curtains to my office, allowing him to feel at home, in peace for the offer he was about to provide me.

The scalpel sunk in easily through his skin, but sc.r.a.ped along the small jutting bone behind his ear. A shudder came over me, one of happiness, the other my pet peeve of shrieking noises; noises like metal to bone. He continued to carve away, using the mirror as his guide as well as the markings I drew. A fabulous cherubic flood colored one half of his neck, as well as the shoulder of his white t-shirt.

He then proceeded to ravage his external ear. Cartilage split impeccably as his hard working hands ripped his own ear from his head, ending with a squish and snap. Sinews of skin like peachy red threads were left behind for me to play with. He gave me the ear, sopping with blood and a strange, tawny puss. Must have been when he pierced his ear drum. I put it in my mouth and swallowed the filet-o-flesh like a raw clam; it hit my stomach and suffused through my intestines as if I had savored holy water.

Then he saw the lines drawn on his face and pushed the scalpel through the sensitive, vitreous humor that was his left eye. Eye juice sprouted viscously, dripping crimson tears down the side of his face.

When he had pa.s.sed the cornea and entered the sclera, Chuck began to twist, forcing the eye into a raging circular motion. It popped into his hand like a small festered potato, and all the while not a word sounded from his drug induced stupor. He obviously needed me more than I needed him, and nothing would stop him from satisfying my needs first.

Then, it seemed, as if his foggy cognizance plundered down a black hole or some needy quicksand, as he began to convulse. I eased the situation with a kiss to his blood-greased forehead and he relaxed. I asked him to proceed, albeit his state was in no need of the further procession of self destruction, but I could not help myself.

I pointed into the mirror as little bines of blood sneaked down its silvery, mock surface. He knew what to do by then. Chuck raised the surgical instrument and entered the tender, pumping spot on his neck, the hearty carotid. He sunk it in deeply as a low choking noise commenced from his slack mouth. Then he followed my drawing like a good little boy and continued cutting until his skin parted like lips and became a separate ent.i.ty from the tightness of his throat.

Muscles poured forth like mince meat pushed through a cheese grater; a display of mashed po-tissue. His Adam's apple protruded like a pointing finger of disdain. My smile radiated a thousand suns; a forever universe of heat and pa.s.sion. He saw this through his one eye and ended the entire ordeal by cutting me out his stringy carotid. Chuck offered it to me like a dead worm before he fell over in a slouch face-first. I imbibed on the entire blood vessel like sweet taffy.

I packed him away like I did all the rest, in large black garbage bags. But first I would dismember the limbs and drop them in buckets of lime and bleach and acetic acid (with a touch of water to make the acid zoom with some fervor). I'd watch the skin melt into a stew of disintegrated meat then turn to liquid at the bottom. I love my life, and my patients...

Cheryl Hansmith closed the black journal and shuddered by the single entry she had finished reading. Tears flowed down her cheeks and seared as if they were made of liquid metal. Her brother Chuck had been missing for almost a month before she used her police skills and put it together; Chuck's constant sessions, the lack of any "help" or "progress" in his mentality.

When she decided to take it upon herself to investigate the show office of Dr. Robert Quinn, she found just what she was looking for...wrapped neatly in a blood-crusted silk cloth in one of his desk drawers was the magic scalpel. The same one he used on Catherine and Chuck and myriad others. His secretary was nice enough to allow her into the suite without the doctor's consent-said that he would be right with her and asked if she could make herself comfortable. She waited, tapped her gloved fingers against everything for clues and could not help but to wonder where exactly Chuck was killed.

When the yellow-haired G.o.d walked into the room, his brow was sweaty and his body stagnant with antiseptic and disinfectant. She immediately withdrew her pistol and he made no move to run. The man simply stared down at the open journal of infidelity and impa.s.sioned killing. She read him his rights and called it down to the station and cuffed him abruptly. She hoped to hurt him just a smidge for what he had done to his clients-especially her brother.

She sat him on the leather lounge chair and stared him down; the winter moon sneaking its star white face across the city sky, florid and thin through his window. She had words for him, but none that could be said without the presence of another witness. One thing was for certain: she was curious as ever as to why he looked so handsome and had the eyes of a patron saint. And she could not wait to converse with him...

To Boil.