Collected
She awoke. It only took a moment for the meaning of the flourescent lights and the smell of iodine to sink in. She curled up in the narrow hospital bed and sobbed, wrapping her arms around herself and rocking slightly. As she cried, she became aware once again that her body ached in new places. She didn’t even wonder what had changed this time. It was too early for that. She cried herself to sleep.
When the doctor entered, she was sitting up in bed staring out the window. He was disturbed to see that she had thrown off the hospital gown and sat in her bed nude. He said a brief, neutral good morning to her as he sat down next to her. He struggled not to stare.
“I’m not doing this.” She said to him, her voice barely above a whisper. She did not turn to face him and continued to look off out the window, across a vista of air conditioning ducts and gravelled tar paper.
“What do you mean, Ms. Pars?” His voice was calm, professional.
“I’m not doing this, these things. It’s not me. I know you all think it’s me. I know you do.” Her shoulders slumped as she cried quietly to herself.
“This upsets you very much, I can tell. This is not the first time you’ve been here, Ms. Pars. May I call you Susan? My name is Dr. Sanjani. Please call me Raaj.” He paused while she cried.
She turned to face him. “Look at me. I bet you’re from psych. You are, aren’t you? So calm, so patient.” Her brow furrowed as she yelled. “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT THIS!”
He seemed unruffled by her outburst, but his gaze didn’t travel over her form. “What am I looking at Ms. Pars?”
“Asshole. Look at me. Look at these tits. What the fuck are they? Double D? I’m an A cup. I weigh 105 pounds. I’m five foot two and I have these fucking THINGS on my chest now. Look at my lips! How many goddamned collagen injections do you think that took? Three sessions? Four? And they’re fucking tattooed. Someone tattooed my lips red. And my eyelids. My eyelids are tattooed blue.”
“Yes, so I see.” He paused for a moment. “And someone did this to you?”
“This is what, my fourth, fifth trip here? Same thing every fucking time. I wake up in the hospital. First couple of times it was in a shared room, now it’s a private room. And that’s probably because you’re concerned I’ll disturb someone.”
“It’s for you own comfort.” He smiled at her with some warmth.
“You’re a liar, Raaj. You really want to keep me calm, don’t you? You’re concerned I’m going to hurt myself or something. I heard it last time, didn’t I? Progressive self-directed abuse or something. Crap. Unusual form of surgical addiction. Crap.”
“Someone found me unconscious, right?”
He nodded to her. “Yes Ms. Pars, you were found unconscious in an office elevator by the night cleaning crew.”
Her eyes grew wide. “No, not at my office?”
“I’m afraid it was, yes.”
“Oh god, now I’ve lost my job too” Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. “They’ll never take me back. I’m always found nude. Always nude. I can’t go back there.”
“Actually, I do have some good news there.” The doctor smiled at her carefully. “Your HR department agreed to put you on medical disability. It’s uncommon these days, but your medical plan has a mental health rider. Apparently only for the executives like yourself. You’re fully covered though.”
“God, you just don’t get it do you, ‘Raaj’? Covering up a couple of absences is one thing. Explaining away a mental health disability leave on your resume? Never. I’m fucked, ‘Raaj’. FUCKED!” She turned to face the window again. This time as she spoke, her voice was flat and low.
“My name is Susan Pars. I’m a graduate of the Wharton School of Business. I graduated Cum Laude. I’m 33 years old. I was married, but my husband left me last month, or maybe it was the month before. Rob. Rob left in January. So it’s three months now. I loved him, you know?”
“I’ve been here what, five times now? The first time, they found me in my car, unconscious and naked. The cops came. I made a statement. They started an investigation. That time it was the piercings. Four piercings in my labia. Two in my nipples. One in my belly button. One in between my vagina and my ass. Four piercings in my ears. Two in each. Molybdenum. All my piercings were some fucked up alloy with molybdenum in it. I took them out. Every time, I take them out. Look. They’re back.”
He looked at her carefully, noticing the flat black studs and rings. They were all of a large gauge, probably noticeable even under her clothing. He noted to himself that it was consistent with her pathology.
“I’m ... I was a senior partner for business development for Gotana India LLC. We outsource for companies like EDS. I liked my job. I liked it a lot. I guess that’s over now.”
“The second time ... a cabby dropped me here. He said I got in his cab from a club I walked out of, stark naked, he thought I was drunk. I passed out in his cab. I hadn’t been drinking. You guys found traces of ruhypnol in my blood. That really got the cops interested. That nice one, what was his name? Oram? Officer Oram, nice older guy. He was sure I was being stalked by someone. I was so happy he believed me. That time it was liposuction, facial resurfacing, the collagen injections and the fucking hair.”
She shook her head slowly. “Jesus christ man. Who the fuck, I mean WHO THE FUCK has the time and money to grow chunks of my skin in a lab, scalp me, and put in hair plugs so I’d be a goddamned blond?” She cried softly without tears. “They scalped me. If you look closely you can see the scars. I’m a blond now. I paid for the DNA tests myself. The hair plugs came from a norwegian woman. Thats all anyone can tell me. She’s a blood type, RH type, immune factor match for me. All I have to do is take a couple of pills a month and my scalp wont be rejected. Nightmare.”
“That’s an extremely radical form of cosmetic surgery, Susan. It must have been very expensive.”
She whipped her head around and glared at him. “You damned well know where the money came from. Its all in your case file isn’t it? I had almost five million set aside before all this began. Its all gone now. There’s a mortgage on my condo. A mortgage.”
“Then it was what? Then it was the tattoos, eyelids, mouth, my labia... my fucking labia are tattood red and swollen from collagen injections. I have a “Slave” flower tattoo on my mound. Later it was ... jesus... next they shortened my achilles tendon. I can hardly walk now. I wear custom high heels. I used to be a runner. I ran two marathons. That’s gone now. All gone. Last time was the worst. Just the fucking worst. I woke up and nothing was different. But I hurt inside. Then I find out that someone did a little ‘nip and tuck’ on my cunt. I’m tiny inside now. I’m like a ten year old inside. God. It’s all on the videos.”
He sat up a little straighter in the stiff plastic hospital chair and tilted his head slightly as he asked his next question. “Ah yes, the videos. You had another DVD with you when you were found.”
She smiled a tiny, brittle smile at him. “Let me guess what it shows. It shows me talking to men with blurred out faces, doctors, lawyers. It shows me getting these fucking THINGS put in my chest. It shows my laughing, smiling. Then the sex starts. Then it shows me fucking men and women.”
A flicker of concern for her language passed over the doctor’s face. Susan noticed it and coughed a dry laugh.
“Fucking... sucking. It shows me getting fucked in every hole. It shows me behaving like no whore could be paid to, RIGHT???”
“Well yes, Susan, you do appear to be engaged in a lot of sexual activity on the DVD. Fairly ... um.. unusual sexual activity.”
“What do I do, doctor? What do I do on this video?”
He paused for a moment. “Perhaps you should view it yourself Susan.” He dimmed the lights in the room and left for a moment. After a minute, he returned pushing a cart with a TV and DVD player on it. He smiled at her briefly. “If you’d put your clothes back on, we could have had an orderly bring it in.”
“I dont care who sees me, Raaj.”
He gave her another practiced, neutral smile.“I understand Susan.”
“No, you dont. Asshole. No one does. Not even me.”
They sat in the dim room light together as the DVD played. The title came up, it read “Of the Collection of Susan Pars – V”. Cheesy porno bump and grind came up from the background. They watched as a parade of images and brief scenes went by. Susan standing by a railing on a bridge, wearing a rain coat. She opens the coat. She’s nude under it. She’s chained from piercing to piercing with tiny black chains. She’s wearing a thin leather choker and spike high heels. She looks at the camera and says. “Suzi has tiny titties” She giggles and sticks out her tongue.
Scenes flicker quickly past... of Susan, Suzi... in an airport, at a doctor’s office, signing papers, waving a thumbs up to the camera. Next she’s in a parking lot, her chest is tightly wrapped from surgery. The scene cuts to a darkened room, something like a warehouse. There are men and women on the edges of the scene. Suzi, wearing only her bandages, heels and a cheap dog collar kneels on the floor. From somewhere close to the camera ribbons of ejaculate land on her upturned face. She laughs and swallows.
Suzi fucks and fucks and fucks. Suzi sucks. Suzi has a man in the ass and a man in her cunt while she sucks a dick. She cries and screams and moans. At one point, she’s slapped to the floor and made to lick cum up off of a man’s boots. She fingers herself. Suzi cums many, many times.
Throughout it all, Suzi... Susan.. talks. She says “Fuck Suzi, rape Suzi, fuck Suzi’s cunt. Fuck Suzi’s ass, masters. Hurt me please masters. Please let Suzi suck you master. Please let Suzi please you masters.”
It goes on and on. Two hours and twenty minutes worth. The video ended without warning. The psychiatrist turned the machine off, saying nothing. He brought the lights back up.
She turned and once again looked back at the window, this time seeing only the drapes. “Same as always. Same each time. No one believes me any more. The cops tell me that if I file another complaint, they’ll come after me for false reports and lying under oath. Poor officer Oram, he believed me for a time. Then he got so angry at me, he yelled at me when he saw the tapes. They found the first ones in my apartment. Now they find them on me.”
“Yes, so I read from your file, Susan”
“Someone is drugging me Raaj. Someone is controlling me. Someone is making me do these things. Oh God. Someone has access to every part of my life. Someone is making me into a fucking blowup sex doll. Someone is making me go along with this. No one can help me either. No one.”
He cleared his throat. “I’d like to help you Susan. I really would.” He began writing on his pad. “I think I can help you a lot Susan. There are some powerful new antipsychotic medications available now. I firmly believe that if you let us treat you with a combination of traditional psychoanalysis and the latest drug therapy, we can help.” He paused briefly.
“You see Susan, I believe that you have suffered an acute psychotic break. You’re suffering from disassociation. You’ve severed your personality into fragments. There’s Suzi and there’s Susan. We can help you re-integrate, heal yourself. You can put an end to this. But you have to help us. You have to stop refusing the antipsychotics we prescribe.”
Susan said nothing. She swung her legs down off the bed and hopped on her toes to the window where she sat down again on the ledge. She quietly turned and looked at the doctor with a small sad smile. “No. I’m not crazy. Someone out there is destroying my life, taking me over, making me into something. There can’t be much more he’ll want to do to me, there can’t.”
“Suzi seems happy, doesn’t she, doctor? I’d like to be happy again. Maybe I can be happy. Look at me. I’m Suzi now.... they, he.. made me into Suzi. I cant go back. Thats all done now.” A tear travelled down her cheek.
“Please discharge me, doctor. Suzi wants to go now. But you’ve been so nice to Suzi, would you like Suzi to be nice to you?”