Wednesday, November 28, 2012

FORESIC PSYCHIATRISTS VS. FORTUNE COOKIES

       FORENSIC PSYCHIATRISTS VS. FORTUNE COOKIES: OR WHAT IS SCHIZOPHRENIA?

While doing research for a novel about a serial killer, I came across these facts in the case of Edward Kemper. Kemper's history is typical of serial killer's: they often have an outburst in their teens, are incarcerated with other juveniles. What is interesting about Kemper is that he was 6' 9" and fit into a theory that males with a genetic anomaly of having an extra Y monochrome, XYY on the 47th, have a propensity for becoming more violent than men with the normal XY DNA.
He also is typical of the precision of forensic and other psychiatrists in evaluating the mental health of an individual, making the ersatz science as accurate as your last fortune cookie.
 
In 1964, he admitted to shooting his grandparents and was sent to Atascadero State Hospital for psychiatric treatment. On the recommendation of two psychiatrists, he was released five years later. In 1972, he killed and decapitated two women. Four months later, he killed a 15-year-old girl, had sex with the dead body, and then dismembered it. Later that year he was examined by two court-appointed psychiatrists and given a clean bill of health. Two months later, Kemper confessed to the brutal murders of eight women, one of whom was his own mother. What this article did not state is that Kemper decapitated his mother and used her head to practice tossing darts. When he became bored he stuffed her head down the garbage disposal. 

He was a prime example of a psychopath as defined by Hervey Cleckley in The Mask of Sanity, a human being devoid of a conscience. Cleckley and his colleague Dr. Thigpen examined the woman who was the model for their book 'The Three Faces of Eve.' Ultimately, they had reservations about Eve's alternate personalities. Multiple personality is so rare that there have been about four cases in the literature since WW II.

MOST PEOPLE HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SCHIZOPHRENIA IS AND WHAT ARE ITS SYMPTOMS
The average person thinks that schizophrenia is a person with two or more distinct personalities. Multiple personality disorder or DID-Dissociative Identity Disorder is either very rare or it does not exist at all.  When I was doing my research for my serial killer novel, I read the work and spoke with Dr. Dorothy Lewis and she was kind enough to provide me with her interviews with men who have killed while they claimed not to recall having committed the murder.  In short, they committed their rimes while in a state of dissociation called a fugue. In rare instances, people have left home to do some errands and do not return for days, weeks, and in some rare instances for years. They create a new identity and when the do recall their real persona, they often return home and the memory of the fugue degrades and is often completely forgotten.  These states, if they exist at all are very rare. 
In 1908 Dr. Eugen Bleuler used the word schizophrenia—which translates into a "splitting of the mind" and comes from the Greek roots schizein ("to split") and phrēn, "mind") was coined by Eugen Bleuler  intended to use the word to describe the separation between personality, thinking, memory, and perception. Bleuler described the symptoms as the 4 A's: flattened Affect, Autism, impaired Association of ideas and Ambivalence. Bleuler realized the illness was not dementia because his patients improved rather than deteriorated, and used the term in place of dementia. Treatment was revolutionized in the mid-1950s with the development and introduction of chlorpromazine or Thorazine which was intended to be an antihistamine when it was discovered by French chemists by happenstance.
The diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia were the subject of a number of controversies. Diagnostic studies indicated that schizophrenia was diagnosed to a far greater extent in the US compared  Europe. This was partly due to looser diagnostic criteria in the US David Rosenhan's 1972 study, published with the title "On being sane in insane places", concluded that the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the US was often subjective and unreliable, leading to the revision of the diagnosis of schizophrenia.The term schizophrenia is commonly misunderstood to mean that affected persons have a "split personality". Although schizophrenia does not include people with multiple personalities. The confusion arises in part due to the literal interpretation Dissociative identity disorder (having a "split personality") was also often misdiagnosed as Schizophrenia based on the loose criteria in the DSM-II.
Irrespective of changes in gun control laws, those with a a severe mental illness such as schizophrenia are less apt to use them than the general population. The mentally ill are more often the subject of communal ire and intolerance rather than the perpetrators of violent behavior.







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ADAM LANZA LOST IN THE CULT OF BEAUTY

                              LOST IN THE TINNITUS OF CONJECTURE

In the AlterNet post below, Bill Moyers calls for us to reject the violence. Humans are violent because evolution has hardwired us with a propensity for aggression while we have received less than the appropriate balance of appeasement gestures than most mammals. These factors combine with a craving for that which we ostensibly abhor since it is genetic. In my research for a serial killer novel, I wrote years ago, I read the written and face-to-face communication between Dr, David Abrahamson and David Berkowitz. Abrahamson was very close to Berkowitz and while two forensics shrinks at Kings County Hospital believed that Berkowitz was insane Abrahamson disagreed. Berkowitz was the accidental conception in the backseat a car and Berkowitz was very disappointed when he met his birth mother. He feigned all of the nonsense with his neighbor’s dog driving him mad. He admitted to Abrahamson, who had spent his life studying murder and those who commit them, that he believed that despite their overt chagrin the people of New York were routing for the Son of Sam to elude police and continue his killing spree.  
    Nobel Prize winning animal behaviorist, Konrad Lorenz, in 'On Aggression' published in 1959, I believe, had already feared that human nature had achieved a point of no return regarding our extinction and said we have reached an evolutionary cul de sac that would lead to escalating aggression and our extinction. Other ethologists tried to counter Lorenz's dire prediction by discussing altruism as the logical antidote to man's infatuation with violence. Stated succinctly, by Dr, Karl Menninger, 'We do not tolerate violence; we love it.'  See Love and Hate by Eibl-Eblesfeldt.
       
Now think when you look at the few photos of Adam Lanza and what do we see? His parents were divorced and they fought. Children irrespective of their age feel on some level responsible for the divorce. Nancy Lanza removed her son from school and taught him at home.  He shoot her multiple times in her face. Wilhelm Stekel said that on some level all mothers believe they have given birth to a Mary or another Messiah.

 Adam targeted six- year-old children who were at the age of what is called the mental developmental of Machiavellian traits when innocence has begun to erode innocence by a child's ability to infer deception and the beginning of the lifelong propensity to deceive, and the the white lies that begin then last through our entire lifetime disgorging an average of between twelve and fourteen white lies per week. With the ability to infer deception comes the natural evolution of many negative traits and children begin to tease which begets bullying, but also, Lanza a bright boy, had begun to discern this the inference of deception at perhaps an accelerated rate and realized he was the target more often than not.

Adam Lanza's photo reveals a frail boy, hiding and we conceal that which we are ashamed of flaunting and his genetic misfortune came with his Dumbo-esque ears and the body of a concentration camp survivor he had draped and hid in over-sized clothing. His haircut resembles a hat, averting attention away from his face and his exaggerated Beatles hairdo, covered those ears that most likely inspired the slings and arrows of mockery and jokes. It is not Adam Lanza's pathology that we must dissect it is ours, our culture where we worship beauty and applaud violence however reprehensible. His mother tried to reverse her disappointment and protect him from a country infatuated with beauty, youth, violence, and money.  It is our disease.
      
Look at the newscasters on TV. With but few exceptions will you see face that has a single wrinkle caused by the external expression of having known any emotion like a series of automations sexually dimorphic Stepford Community or if you prefer Barbies and Kens. While those in their eighties are the fastest growing segment in our population we have little respect for the elderly and ageism is rampant.  It wasn't ASPERGER'S that caused Beauty to Die Today, it was all of us.
Stay tuned for Hollywood Tonight!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Menninger
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Stekel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Tonight
http://aaronadavid.wordpress.com/

THE VAMPIRE DRAGO



                                    THE SKIN BENEATH THE SKIN OF MADNESS
                                                 US COPYRIGHT PROTECTED  
                                                        
                                                             Chapter I                                                                                                                                                     
                                                 Lake Worth, Florida 1994
From the bedroom door, he watched his mother banging a john. As they screamed in joy or pain, Watkis’s chest, sweaty and hairless, slapped his mother's breasts and their grunts and groans increased his loathing and rage. He fired six rounds from a Remington R-25 into Ed Watkis’s back. Blood splashed from the divots in Ed’s flesh, and the eye of a cracked rib winked. The toothless wino’s body jerked and he died where three had been born between Rosalie Drago's legs. The blasts dislodged the needle from Nat King Cole’s An Affair to Remember and the stylus clattered against the vinyl’s edge. His mother, shocked and blood splattered, stared into her son’s eyes and spoke, but he heard none of the words she spit through the quivering slit of her lips, a pair of wriggling worms.
He was mourning the anniversary of his beloved sister’s death. She had died two days after an aide had raped her in 45th Street Clinic in Palm Beach, Florida. The last time he saw her, he had held her tight as if to quiet his heart while his tears dropped onto her blond hair. She had anorexia, had begun cutting herself, and a potassium deficiency had caused her heart to seize.

Watkis's blood dripped from Rosalie’s face to her breasts. She yanked the bloody sheet to her throat. 
           “You’re an evil bastard. Christ, I knew you were a shit the minute I held you in my arms and you never stopped bawling.”

Watkis’s corpse draped Rosalie, pinning her. Her legs crawling with spider veins had slid from under the sheet. 
              She said, “You don’t have the balls to shoot your mother.”
              “You don’t remember.”
               “What are you talkin’ about?”
               “Michelline, your daughter today is her first death day.”
               “You still pissed off over that?”
He smiled. He fired the semi-automatic until her head, a jack-o-lantern, he thought, became a blob of pulp. Skull fragments lodged in the wall and headboard. He sank to his knees and cried, “Oh, Michelline!” He would never cry again.
  
 He wobbled down the creaking stairs, and paused to scan the family pictures sitting on yellowed doilies atop the warped piano whose cracked keys signified something he could not articulate. He replaced the rifle in the rack. He ambled into the kitchen, grabbed a cola from the refrigerator, and guzzled it in two swigs.  

He slipped into his rain slicker and walked through the front door over the whining floorboards of the front porch. The rain fell, a wall of pins, and a fist of roiling black clouds choked the house while skeletal lightning bolts coupled and danced against the anthracite colored clouds. He stepped into the burning rain. He had just turned fifteen.
                              
Peter’s drenched clothes were chains, the eldest of Rosalie Drago’s sons, dragged toward home. A rusted truck, driven by his brother, Eric, pulled up, splashing Peter. Eric's girlfriend, Tanya, threw the door open. Peter climbed in and dropped his aching head into the sack of his hands. On a patch of dirt ten feet from the porch, Eric parked. They ran from the truck into the house.
Shaking off his long, wet hair like a dog, Eric said, “Where you been?”

A soaked Marlboro stuck to Peter's lower lip. He said, “The bitch asked me to get beer and butts.” From beneath his raincoat, he removed a wet paper bag. The beer and Marlboros ™hit the floor. Peter tried lighting his cigarette.
             Eric said, “It’s soaked. You forgot your medication, didn’t you?”


             Peter nodded, “She's not Michelline?”
           “Michelline's dead,” Eric said, “You met Tanya. Let’s get your pills.”
They walked through the foyer, reeking of camphor, and into the kitchen. Eric took two vials of pills out of the cabinet and filled a glass of water for Peter. “Swallow them!” Eric inspected Peter's mouth. Eric grabbed two beers from the refrigerator and removed the metal caps with his teeth. Tanya squealed, “I love that.”

Peter went upstairs; Eric led Tanya into his room. He kissed her; she squirmed in his embrace. 
         “Your mother is home.”
           “You think she gives a shit.” Eric saw red confetti-sized images fluttering through his mind. Eric stared into Tanya’s eyes. She froze; his fingers skimmed her sweat dappled flesh, raising the fine hair, a human caterpillar. His kiss, fluttering moth wings on her lips, tingled. She opened her mouth for the tongue she had to wait. Pushing her onto his mattress, he ripped her jeans off, her panties with his teeth. Hands as if leg irons spread her ankles, his erection, a long slow stroke, penetrated Tanya, igniting a fire that rose from her curled toes to her scalp. He pulled out, she whimpered, he snatched her butt, teasing her, scorching her coral curtained eye to inter his torment, amid echoed gunshots, to bury his rage so deep within Tanya her tears exchanged his fury for whispers if not silence, while her irises, crescents, rolled under her half shuttered lids, a slot machine. His last kiss squeezed three dollops of blood to the surface.

From upstairs, they heard the toilet flush, a door slammed, and Peter screaming something incomprehensible, ran down the stairs. Tanya said, “What's that?”
        “It’s Peter,” said Eric, caressing her face, slowly moving inside her where anger murmured still. 

Peter's shrieks soared until… Easing from within Tanya, who could no longer tell the difference between pain and pleasure, Eric slipped into his jeans. Tanya watched sweat drops slide down his spine as he left the room, leaving molten pearls of semen on the sheet and her salivary wine on her lips. She placed her red fingernail in one pear atoll, imagining their baby kicking her womb. A drop of blood fell hitting the sheet, close to what her fancy conjured, making her recoil. She looked up and saw what appeared to be blood squirm through the cracks were the ceiling and wall converged. She stood on the bed. It was Blood! Her heart swelled, filling her throat, to escape what she could neither believe nor endure. Peter screamed, “They’ve been shot.”

Tanya became dizzy as she rose, slipping into her jeans, and ran upstairs, buttoning her blouse in her ascent. Eric held a fistful of Peter's shirt. A bare light bulb swung overhead, the veins in their foreheads shone as the light swayed. On the bed, Rosalie and Watkis, a pair of overfed shattered mannequins, lay tattooed with the blood they exchanged.
          “I killed them,” Eric said. Checking for a pulse, he held their wrists together. Their hands resembled flopped, hanged men. Panic, a rat scuttled through Tanya’s mind, bearing her cry, “Oh, my god, are they dead?”
          Eric said, “Yes. I’d have used an axe, if I could do it again.”

Eric held Tanya’s hand, escorted her outside, and opened the truck door. The storm had blown passed; the rain, too. The sun was a laser. Eric’s eyes remained deadlocked on the warped lucent snake of hot air waggling upward along the black mirror of macadam. Tanya looked at him with an admixture of awe and dread, waiting for him to speak, his stillness scared her more than what remained of Rosalie’s face and Watkis’s obscene white body laying on her in the crimson sack of the bed. Tanya placed her head on Eric’s shoulder. Her nails, quivering like thistle in the wind, grazed his cheek, slicing the heads of his tears. At first, Eric’s wrath dismissed what memory could not bear, missing frames in the film, and he was deceived into believing Peter had shot them. By the time, he had driven Tanya home his fury accessed the developing images. Tanya loved him more than anyone could tolerate and kissed him with such tenderness her heart all but burst. She called him one crazy bastard and she knew, but wouldn’t say it, he had sided with the devil. Eric remained dumb. He didn’t watch Tanya leave the truck but waited until her door closed before he drove to Sheriff Thompson’s office.

They tried and convicted Eric as a juvenile. A panel of six psychiatrists decided Eric was insane when he had shot Rosalie and Watkis. Judge Eugen Bleuler sentenced him to the state asylum for the violent and criminally insane at Loxahatchee where he would remain until he no longer represented a danger to society. No one expected Eric Salvatore Drago to walk back out through those rusty gates alive. They were wrong. They were dead wrong.

                           





                                    








                                    




                                         

                                             Chapter II
                                         December 2012



Considered one of the preeminent architects in the country, Eric Drago had refurbished, The Willows, an English Tudor mansion. Embraced by ancient oaks, poplars, huge evergreens, spruces, and immense Japanese maples, it sat on a hill surrounded by fifty acres of lush lawn, gardens, including a maze, and with a view of the Long Island Sound. Divided by cross gables, he had renovated the residence from its foundation, to its slate roof, its reframed chestnut timbers, its brick walls, and marble façade. He had razed the crumbling brick walls protecting the property’s perimeter, layered it with a patina of stucco painted the color of wet sand, and adorned the parapet with dense ivy. 
Carved marble buttresses flanked two panels of wrought iron and at the gate, an armed guard sat in a brick kiosk, watching rows of surveillance monitors. The egress opened onto a driveway, straddled by trees, traversed a wooden bridge, over a brook, and encircled a fountain, near the main entrance. The setting sun’s dying light filtered through wet leaves, a mist prism, refracting a lucent rainbow on the windows facing the northwest, and a long shadow on the lawn. A flock of crows had gathered on the roof preparing to take flight.

In the dark master bedroom, Eric Drago lay within a woman’s arms. They had made love and now slept on a four-poster built by Thomas Chippendale with a gilded canopy, and drawn eggplant damask drapes. According to rumor, it had belonged to a French Courtesan who had died of syphilis and sat across from an immense marble fireplace on the far wall. The new mattress had won the Trillium award despite its absurd name, Sleeping Beauty Footloose, a playpen for years of pain-free comfort and debauchery.

Carved into the fireplace were Indian figures in poses from The Kama Sutra. Two leather divans sat on one of the hand-woven Oriental rugs on the parquet floor, and Drago had draped the windows with green velvet over tea-dipped white lace. A Chippendale desk with baroque inlays and a pair tufted Sheraton chairs stood beside one window. On the far side of the bed, Atwood exuded the scent a warm loaf of bread and lilac. Serena’s hair flowed as if black lava over the down pillows in monogrammed silk cases.

Burnished gold and mango damask chairs with Serge covers stood near the hearth. A painting Neptune and Amphitrite, an original, by Flemish artist, Jan Gossart, hung over the mantel. Several logs on the lattice smoldered with an orange glow, ashes rose as if black and white butterflies and two logs cracked in half with a soft hiss. In front of two walk-in closets were two large oval pier glasses.
The electronic yelp of the alarm clock jarred Eric from his nap and the brunette’s arms. Direct sunlight at any hour was unwelcome and he opened his blue eyes, winced, from a blade of sunlight through the window curtains, into the otherwise embryonic chamber, and glared at the clock radio: 7:27 PM. He silenced the clock and spoke to the recumbent woman in a drowse next to him. “Why does every whore and miscreant believe in God and the Devil? My mother spouted scripture to the men between her legs while she spat in their faces.”

A smile tugged his lips like a pulled stitch. Drago had been in the middle of a dream set in Loxahatchee. A young patient had opened an elderly man’s skull with a cleaver. The victim, Drago’s friend, made Eric beat the killer with such force he fractured the man’s skull. Pieces of broken bone lay scattered on the floor as if someone had dropped a glass, and blood splattered the walls twenty feet from where the two men had died. All the blood, all the pain, all of it transfigured into a sequence of dreams that incurred Eric’s heart to kick his ribs. Those violent reminiscences were half-interred in Drago’s conscious, floating as if a waggling kite carried into the black sky on Michelline’s anniversary and burrowed beneath the skin of Eric’s mind, a disease bearing tick, waiting.         

Eric’s companion, a famous model, Serena Atwood, lay as if sculpted from stone. Seminal fluid dripped from his master’s cyclopean eye. A lover had once called Eric a walking endocrine gland. Did his erections, which sometimes lasted for hours, indicate a vascular or neurological abnormality? Fortunately, he had a choice of comely repositories for his dictator’s demands.

Alarmed by Eric’s recurrent headaches, his internist, Dr. Liss, decided to rule out a possible a pituitary tumor and he had hospitalized Drago a week ago for test: MRIs, a glucose tolerance test, and multiple blood screens to rule out abnormal levels of cortisol, human growth hormone, testosterone, and thyroid function. Drago had seen Liss that afternoon.

Atwood often appeared in Victoria’s Secret, Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, and myriad television commercials, and she was Drago’s frequent companion. Atwood had ordered the roses, lilies, and orchids that Thelma Caldwell, his housekeeper, had arranged in ten vases, according to Atwood’s instructions. Six vases were Ming porcelain, and the one that got away, which Steve Wynn whose ten million dollar bid Eric decided not surpass.

Drago raised his muscular arms, yawned, arched his back, and stretched, inhaling the floral bouquets as if sipping wine. In the hall, Duncan and Reynard, twin one-hundred and fifty pound Rottweilers, cried at the door. Eric, who slept nude, crossed the room and opened the double mahogany doors. The dogs jumped up, and slobbered over his lean muscular body. When Serena slept over, he banished them from the room where they usually slept with their master. They dashed through the open door, jumped on the bed, and lapped Serena’s face. She winced and groaned as she tried fending them off. Drago snapped his fingers, and they ran to his side. He led them to the door, allowed them to kiss his cheeks, and told them they would go for a run along the water later. Serena thanked him, blew a kiss, and collapsed into the pile of pillows.

 He had recreated the bathroom walls using black marble, dark-green malachite pilasters, stenciled brass molding, and ormolu carvings, with a shell-shaped whirlpool bath, the sunken tub stood between it and his La Scala T 650 Entertainment Jacuzzi “designed for individuals with discerning taste.” Compared to Milan’s opera house, “La Scala is a true marvel in sight and sound.” Drago’s unit provided the discerning owner and friends with the ultimate home Atheater and entertainment system.” It ‘showcased’ a 52-inch high-definition TV and a surround sound system so powerful it made the most subtle nuances spring to life. It came with a DVD, CD player, and a floating remote, including fingertip access to all its innovative features.

Naked, he stretched, yawned, and ran his fingers through a great mass of wavy hair that almost stroked the vines of his external obliques, tapering toward his 30” waist and the woven hemp-like muscles of his abdomen. He emptied his bladder, stretched his calves, and hamstrings by leaning on an angle against a wall. To maintain his health, he lifted free weights, ran for six hours a week, remained limber with yoga and he now spread a bamboo mat on the bathroom floor, and watched a second 42-inch TV on a marble vanity. Facing the screen, he bent at the waist and pulled back on his toes, he did one thousand crunches, followed by five sets of two hundred pushups, a series of slow stretching exercises into a full split.

On the television, he winced as a tank crumpled cars. Mangled bodies oozed blood had turning the bricks into a rust shade, and the constant skirmishes around the globe raged on in its infantile madness. Their absurd conflagration threatened the structure of the Church of the Nativity, the tabernacle set atop the hallowed ground where one God had been born.

 The chaotic rhythm combined the destructive elements of the Dionysian ritual of the Saturnalia regressing from joy to the shredding a sacrificial lamb whose blood offering seeped into the soil, regenerated the foliage, and in its new incarnation the former Bacchanal had driven seven billion people mad. This chronic propensity toward mass murder had revived, Drago decided, a modern incarnation of the chorea-like dancing manias such as the purported curse of John the Baptist and other collective hysterical disorders. He owned a sixteenth-century rendering by Pieter Brueghel the elder’s Wedding Dance pooled with The Fall of the Rebel Angels had predicted the lunacy in a world polluted by runaway aggression. Children with assault rifles and acne, in the US, who had failed to find their niche in the group, mitigated their torment by escaping reality by huffing petroleum distillates, eating MDMA, shaved their heads and slaughtered the peers who had not embraced with automatic rifles.

President Obama, said the anchor, had annoyed Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu over Obama’s dithering with economic sanctions when force was needed to terminate Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.

The volatile nature of man, the random killings, and the mass murders performed in the name of God, depressed Eric. Unable to cry after Michelline’s death he would have found relief in the physical detoxification of those tears when he had seen the streets awash with doctors and nurses treating the wounded and the dying. Well… it was sheer insanity for murder without art, and tempered by reason, and without a succinct goal became the repository of mere delusions.

Disgusted by the endless fighting, Drago changed the channel to 1 NY. He saw Commissioner Rattan of the New York Police Department award a medal of honor and promoted Lieutenant Jon Lang. Lang walked to the podium, appeared to have blushed, and when Lang mentioned his fellow officers, he choked on his tears. He told the audience how a gang of drug dealers, the Cobras had murdered his partner, who had died in Lang’s arms, and tears stuck to Lang’s cheeks.

The face of Lang’s wife, Nicole, seated in the front row of the audience, filled the screen. Drago froze and his heart squirmed in his chest her personified into a premature baby suffocating. For some reason, these impressions commingled with the blood and chaos in the world and the vivid impression of Nicole Lang’s face. He dropped the strap, but he held the razor as if he were choking it to death. He walked up to the screen and traced Mrs. Nicole Lang’s face with his forefinger.
“Michelline,” he said as if whispering so no one else in the room could hear and again he repeated, “Michelline,” as if a prayer.

Eric raised his head and stared at himself in the mirror, watching his lips and tongue articulated the sounds of his dead sister’s name, “Michelline, why had you lived, you’d look like Nicole. Lieutenant Detective Jon Lang’s wife, Nicole, and I will be together soon, very soon, darling.
            
 He had first seen Nicole several months earlier when he had met Serena for dinner, he saw Nicole get into a cab with Jennifer Ferragamo, who worked for the same agency, Wet Heat, as Serena and Nicole. Nicole had used her modeling career to pay for her education and compose her doctoral thesis, and became a clinical psychologist who specialized in eclectic therapeutic modalities for troubled, often emotionally and physically abused, children and earned her doctorate from NYU/Bellevue Hospital. Although he saw her for an instant, Nicole’s face haunted him like the bent and cracked picture of his sister he kept in his billfold pressed to his heart. He planned to pursue Nicole. Eric considered her marriage to Lieutenant Detective Lang, as in marital intrigues as nothing more than a mild impediment. Marriage he believed limited his competition to one man rather than millions of potential suitors.


Eric turned off the TV and assumed a lotus position, and meditated for fifteen minutes the first of his twice daily periods of silent contemplation. He stood, rolled up the mat, ambled to the counter, and stood in front of the full-length mirror. With the sweep of his forefinger, he inspected his tongue, the insides of his cheeks, and his throat. He observed the ceremony in the mirror. Naked before the mirror, he inspected his body for moles, freckles and other indices of ill health, he manicured his pubic hair, and this tugged him further out into the riptide of his sensual avarice. He pruned the growth under his arms, and shaved his chest because of the current androgynous fashion among the women he courted, and hair occluded the sinew of a body a great sculptor, perhaps even a God, appeared to have chiseled from granite.

Then he took his Braun from its cradle, inserted a brush on the metal spindle, spread a dollop of toothpaste, and massaged his gums and teeth for two minutes, and thirty seconds brushing his tongue. He held the tip between his thumb and forefinger so he could examine the movements of his uvula. This was part of his ritual, but he wasn’t certain why. Drago took a wooden bowl of Yardley shaving soap and mineral oil from the medicine cabinet, applied a layer of oil to his face, and used a natural bristle brush and warm water to whip the soap into a froth he applied to his face. He shaved with a straight razor he sharpened on a leather strap before each use and enjoyed working the blade against the leather.

He took the morning’s mail off his Carlton House desk and sorted it: a telephone bill, LIPA, cable, five credit card statements, and the latest catalog from Victoria’s Secret whose cover Serena Atwood graced for the thirty-sixth time. He shredded the junk mail filed the bills in the desk, and tossed the catalog on the pillow next to Atwood. The catalogs were now what Lenny Bruce had called stroke books and through a magical transfiguration, they seduced men into the belief that by purchasing the erotic lingerie worn by the models their two hundred and twenty pound wives would become a Serena Atwood.

The sacred and forbidden was replaced by his lust, and his attention was focused on Serena stretched out on his bed. She lay with her bare hip jutting out beneath the covers, a hill along the horizon that did not decrease his poignant desire. 

Aroused by seeing Detective Lang’s wife, he whispered in Atwood’s ear. “Even in your sleep you pose.” He listened to the soft bubbling of salivary champagne in her throat and nibbled her earlobe. Eric had already withdrawn his lips when Serena waved her limped hand as if swatting a fly.
 She had fallen asleep wearing a soft bra. He unhinged its bow, kissed her nipples, and she lifted her breasts toward his voluptuous lips. Once he had roused her, a spider scuttling over his knee distracted him. He caught it; escorted it to the window, freed it, and paused to watch the crows extend their wings and take flight in three perfect V-shaped formations.

He returned to Serena who lay stomach down on the bed. He clasped her ankles and spread her long legs while her glossy image lay on his pillow staring up at him, swelling his lust into a madness loitering on the verge of what he could not control.

Tears, containing neither sorrow nor joy, dripped from Serena’s eyes and her voice, a velvet voice rasp. “Don't...Eric...you...”

His tongue traversed the sole of her left foot, loitered on the tender skin on the underside of her knee, drowning her inhibitions. What reticence she maintained had dissolved in his powerful hands and reminiscences of their devotion whose physical expression forced her to muffle her screams of delight by biting a pillow. She begged, latched onto his thick hair, and tried tugging him toward the fount of her desire, whose searing heat launched imagined bifurcated flames.

“Kiss it, please!”

“What?”

“Kiss it!”

 His coiled tongue slithered around her clitoris, avoiding direct contact, and he permitted a drop, a salivary crest, a caress once removed, that enhanced her delirium until her words ran together in the syntactical ramblings of a word salad ending in whimpers, as if a feral cat in heat cried in the distance.  Facing her, Drago locked onto Serena’s eyes but saw Nicole Lang in the emerald green tarn beneath him. Arching his back, he rose to his knees and came with a sound unlike that of any other man she had known.

 Massaging his eyes and temples, Serena placed his beautiful face in her lap and her tears were more frequent than unusual. The shuddering tips of her fingers traced his faultless features through the curtain of his thick black hair. His jaw’s subtle upward curve and rounded cheekbones evoked images of Native American Indians. Dimples began below his cheekbones, straddled his graceful nose and cupped his lips, beyond which his white teeth glistened from within the frame of his lips, perfectly formed they struck the common observer as lewd, and his skin tone evoked red sandstone in the light of early dawn. The bluest eyes she had ever seen seethed and smiled in the flux of as if mood stones. A white scar from a razor, held in an enemy's sweaty hand, ran along his neck from below his right ear just short of his throat’s midline. His nipples were tiny pink buds. At 6'5" and 230 pounds and wrapped tight as a lanyard, Eric's hairless body resembled an anatomical rendering of all the human muscles.

“You remember I'm visiting Jennifer tonight.”

“Yes send her my best or try to describe the ineffable.”

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“It is a migraine. How’s your father doing, I had forgotten to ask earlier?”

“No change.”

 Serena’s father had slipped into a coma post a ‘perfunctory’ coronary artery bypass.

Knowing his words made little difference, he said, “I've seen people in comas emerge without a jot of brain damage. What's the matter?”

“I don't want this baby.”

“We’ll give it up for adoption.”

Serena and Eric played a conjugal diversion she had instigated. Pretending to be siblings, they went to a club, and selected attractive strangers with whom they often had sex. Humiliated by her own game, the last time, she awakened the following morning in a dolor with ideas regarding suicide as she noticed the stranger, or strangers, who lay beside her where Eric belonged.

 “When you picked up Terri,” Serena reached for her calendar on her night table for the exact reference. “And I met her lawyer brother, though I suspect he’s her husband” She paused to located his name, “Roger, I had sex with him and with you and I'm certain I was ovulating.”

“What about your demand for safe sex?”

“He wore a condom. I watched him, well… I put it on. It turned the idiot on.”

“Then what’s the …” Eric knew but it was part of our cultural vernacular to ask.

“It must have broken because I found semen in my vagina.”
           
 “Didn't you wear your diaphragm as backup?”
 
“I don't remember.”   
  
 “It's my child.”
 
“If this baby isn't yours, I don't want that man’s child. It's my body!”
  
 “Not when you carry a fetus. It is God's will. You change one atom of his plan and we are doomed.”
Drago laughed and his mirth, even in jest carried an ominous portent.
Their interdependency had become a fixture in the cognitive and emotional set of their friendship like an old bedroom set. An heirloom handed down from an aunt who had received it as wedding gift, polishing it with obsessive diligence and had placed huge doilies, candlesticks, and photos of her burgeoning family tree. Inside her silverware also polished with the devotion of a true believer’s religious fervor.

Serena suffered from some inaccessible psychological torment for her entire life, but what caused her indelible agony remained unknown and no amount of introspection would have made them concrete or accessible. Drago kissed her—he made the common term, soul kiss, a palpable entity, for his penetration transcended the physical act—and her soared for the duration.

 Later, Eric, in a robe, escorted Atwood down the stairs and across the courtyard to one of the two garages. She cried while driving to visit Jennifer Ferragamo. Convinced that their child evolving in her womb represented a dreadful omen, she neither wanted it or the responsibility, but she feared Drago and his reaction despite their affection. Part of his mystique was her inability to comprehend the complexities of his incredible mind and its psychological matrix.

Drago washed his hair in the sink before using a cholesterol conditioner. He massaged an apricot-scented sculpting gel into his hair, blow-dried it, combed it straight back, braided it and placed it in a handmade silver and turquoise hair clip. His cologne, Frenzy, promised to buckle the knees of prospective objects of desire.   

Duncan and Reynard by the closed doors expressed their lament in a growl and Eric heard Caldwell’s tentative attempt to soothe them and her weak tapping on the heavy mahogany doors and in Eric’s case, he slithered along the floor as if on a conveyor belt, to the door. He was naked but enjoyed Caldwell’s fluster. “Yes!”
“I am very sorry to disturb you.” Her eyes explored his naked body. Her embarrassment incurred blush on her gray cheeks as one of the few signs she was alive. Her skin had wrinkled and thinned like onion skin, her long crooked nose, her tiny eyes, and angular facial bones evoked images of a pterodactyl. “I hope I didn’t disturb you.”
“You know you are. I’m a hunk of addled meat to you.”
“It is not as if I’d spent my life as a nun. I was a married woman.”
“You miss the friction, don’t you? You watched us through the keyhole; you listened by the door or your timing is precise?” Before she answered, Drago reached out and ran his fingers over Caldwell’s face down to her throat, pulsing beneath his fingertips.
 “There. There. There.”
Caldwell grabbed his wrist and squirmed as if he was choking her but he was gentle and he withdrew his hand and said, “The men finished fixing the water main, sir.”
“Good. Tell them clean up their mess or I’ll make them fuck you for a gratuity.”
 He told her to give them a hundred each from the petty cash box in his office desk drawer.
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