The Shrink's reading light buzzed, set so low that its filament barely glowed, softening her features. As carriers get older, they begin to look more like full-blown peeps - wiry, wide-eyed, and gauntly beautiful. They don't have enough flesh to get wrinkles; the parasite burns calories like running a marathon. Even after my afternoon at the diner, I was a little hungry myself.
After a few moments, she took her hands from the papers, steepled her fingers, and peered at me. "So, let me guess..."
This was how Dr. Prolix started every session, telling me what was in my own head. She wasn't much for the so-how-does-that-make-you-feel school of head-shrinking. I noticed that her voice had the same dry timbre as Sarah's, with a hint of dead, rustling leaves among her words.
"You have finally reached your goal," she said. "And yet your long-sought redemption isn't what you thought it would be."
I had to sigh. The worst part of visiting the Shrink was being read like a book. But I decided not to make things too easy for her and just shrugged. "I don't know. I had a long day drinking coffee and waiting for the clouds to clear. And then Sarah put up a wicked fight."
"But the difficulty of a challenge usually makes its accomplishment more satisfying, not less."
"Easy for you to say." The bruises on my chest were still throbbing, and my ribs were knitting back together in an itchy way. "But it wasn't really the fight. The messed-up thing was that Sarah recognized me. She said my name."
Dr. Prolix's Botoxed eyes widened even farther. "When you captured your other girlfriends, they didn't speak to you, did they?"
"No. Just screamed when they saw my face."
She smiled gently. "That means they loved you."
"I doubt it. None of them knew me that well." Other than Sarah, who I'd met before I turned contagious, every woman I'd ever started a relationship with had begun to change in a matter of weeks.
"But they must have felt something for you, or the anathema wouldn't have taken hold." She smiled. "You're a very attractive boy, Cal."
I cleared my throat. A compliment from a five-hundred-year-old is like when your aunt says you're cute. Not helpful in any way.
"How's that going anyway?" she added.
"What? The enforced celibacy? Just great. Loving it."
"Did you try the rubber band trick?"
I held up my wrist. The Shrink had suggested I wear a rubber band there and ping myself with it every time I had a sexual thought. Negative reinforcement, like swatting your dog with a rolled-up newspaper.
"Mmm. A bit raw, isn't it?" she said.
I glanced down at my wrist, which looked like I'd been wearing a razor-wire bracelet. "Evolution versus a rubber band. Which would you bet on?"
She nodded sympathetically. "Shall we turn back to Sarah?"
"Please. At least I know she really loved me; she almost killed me." I stretched in the chair, my still-tender ribs creaking. "Here's the funny thing, though. She was nested upstairs, with these big-ass windows looking out over the river. You could see Manhattan perfectly."
"What's so strange about that, Cal?"
I glanced away from her gaze, but the blank eyes of the dolls weren't much better. Finally, I stared at the floor, where a tiny tumbleweed of dust was being sucked toward Dr. Prolix. Inescapably.
"Sarah was in love with Manhattan. The streets, the parks, everything about it. She owned all these New York photo books, knew the histories of buildings. How could she stand to look at the skyline?" I glanced up at Dr. Prolix. "Could her anathema be, like, broken somehow?"
The Shrink's fingers steepled again as she shook her head. "Not broken, exactly. The anathema can work in mysterious ways. My patients and the legends both report similar obsessions. I believe your generation calls it stalking."
"Um, maybe. How do you mean?"
"The anathema creates a great hatred for beloved things. But that doesn't mean that the love itself is entirely extinguished."
I frowned. "But I thought that was the point. Getting you to reject your old life."
"Yes, but the human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side." Dr. Prolix leaned back in her chair. "You're nineteen, Cal. Haven't you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love."
"Uh, yeah. That would pretty much be stalking." I nodded. "Kind of a fatal attraction thing?"
"Yes, fatal is an apt word. It happens among the undead as well."
A little shiver went through me. Only the really old hunters use the word undead, but you have to admit it has a certain ring to it.
"There are legends," she said, "and modern case studies in my files. Some of the undead find a balancing point between the attraction of their old obsessions and the revulsion of the anathema. They live on this knife's edge, always pushed and pulled."
"Hoboken," I said softly. Or my sex life, for that matter.
We were silent for a while, and I remembered Sarah's face after the pills had taken effect. She'd gazed at me without terror. I wondered if Sarah had ever stalked me, watching from the darkness after disappearing from my life, wanting a last glimpse before her Manhattan anathema had driven her across the river.
I cleared my throat. "Couldn't that mean that Sarah might be more human than most peeps? After I gave her the pills, she wanted to see her Elvis doll ... that is, the anathema I'd brought. She asked to see it."
Dr. Prolix raised an eyebrow. "Cal, you aren't fantasizing that Sarah might recover completely, are you?"
"Um ... no?"
"That you might one day get back together? That you could have a lover again? One your own age, whom you couldn't infect, because she already carries the disease?"
I swallowed and shook my head no, not wanting the lecture in Peeps 101 repeated to me: Full-blown peeps never come back.
You can whack the parasite into submission with drugs, but it's hard to wipe it out completely. Like a tapeworm, it starts off microscopic but grows much bigger, flooding your body with different parts of itself. It wraps around your spine, creates cysts in your brain, changes your whole being to suit its purposes. Even if you could remove it surgically, the eggs can hide in your bone marrow or your brain. The symptoms can be controlled, but skip one pill, miss one shot, or just have a really upsetting bad-hair day, and you go feral all over again. Sarah could never be let loose in a normal human community.