Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (7 page)

David shook his head. He
held Jonah in suspense for a few seconds, then said, “You’re
thinking two years.”

Jonah nodded. It was two
years in Michigan, he thought. Once you got your doctorate, you got
a limited license. But you had to have two years of supervised
experience before they removed “limited” from your
title.

“It’s not really two
years,” David said. “It’s 4,000 hours, and that’s supposed to take
about two years.”

Jonah nodded.

“Half that time has to be
direct client hours. The rest can be paperwork, supervision, client
prep and things of that nature. Most people don’t see thirty
clients a week like you do.” David smiled. “And I’m sure you spend
at least another thirty on the other stuff,” he said, then
winked.

Jonah put on a fake smile
of his own. David was intimating that he pretend he spent sixty
hours a week tending to thirty hours of clients. David didn’t
realize that it was probably more like seventy.

David said, “You do the
math.”

Jonah did do the math. It
would be about three and a half months.

#

“Wow, bro!” Tate said in
his ingratiating voice. “What an opportunity this is for
you.”

They were sitting on Tate’s
couch, the room not yet filled with music, the beer still in the
refrigerator, Tate rolling joint number one. Jonah couldn’t wait
for him to finish. He had forgone going to lunch with everyone,
saying he had a few things to take care of. His thoughts had been
tormenting him ever since he’d left the Lansing office. The joint
would give him the perspective he needed.

Tate didn’t wait for the
joint. He got right inside Jonah’s head. “But you’re not sure about
it, are you, bro?”

“Sure I am,” Jonah replied,
doubting he could fool Tate, but trying anyway. “Sixty-thousand,
plus benefits.”

Ignoring Jonah’s bullshit,
Tate said, “You don’t trust that it’s real.”

This time, Jonah didn’t
try. He just waited for Tate, who now had the rolled joint between
the thumb and index finger of his left hand. After a few seconds,
Tate smiled and said, “You’re wondering why David is encouraging
you to get your license so fast.”

Jonah sighed, then held his
hand out to Tate.

“Sorry, bro, by all means,”
Tate said, passing over the joint.

Jonah pulled his lighter
from his pocket and lit the joint. Seconds later, he passed it to
Tate.

“Yeah,” Jonah said. “Of
course I’m wondering why. If it’s true what he said about paying me
half, then the sooner I’m licensed, the sooner he starts making
less money. Or, if I take the job Cushing offered, the sooner he
loses me.”

Tate finished sucking in
his hit, then held up a finger for Jonah to wait. After about ten
seconds, he exhaled the smoke and handed over the joint. He threw
his hands to the side and said, “Bro! Bro! Bro! You’re overlooking
the obvious.”

“What’s that?” Jonah asked
before bringing the joint to his mouth. Soon he would be loose, and
discussing this would be purely intellectual, not anxiety
provoking.

Before telling Jonah what
the obvious was, Tate picked at Jonah’s brain a little more. “You
think David is just in a hurry to get rid of you. Maybe it has to
do with the attack. Maybe David put the whole job idea in Cushing’s
head. Then he used the fifty-percent-of-what-you-make offer just as
a way to make it look like he wanted to keep you, all the while
knowing you would decline and he would be rid of you. You’re
worried that what he said about getting your license faster was all
bullshit and in the end will come back to bite you in the
ass.”
Having said this, Tate took the joint from Jonah.

Tate hadn’t missed on one
point. “Yeah,” Jonah said. “But what’s the obvious?”

Tate made him wait until he
was done with his hit, then said, “That he needs you. He’s finally
got someone who does the evaluations right. He doesn’t have to
spend time worrying about the Stanton office, because he knows
you’ll be fine. He appreciates that, so he’s trying to throw you a
bone. But you would never consider this explanation, because it’s
positive. There’s nothing negative about it for you to keep from
losing against, so there’s no need to consider it.”

Tate laughed mockingly as
Jonah took a hit. But being mocked didn’t annoy Jonah. Tate’s
explanation was positive, and it sounded logical enough.

After exhaling the smoke, Jonah said,
“Yes, you’re probably right.”

Tate took one last hit
before putting the joint out. He then gave Jonah his intense
look.

“What?” Jonah asked.

Tate laughed mockingly
again, then said, “No, bro. I said it was the obvious explanation,
not the right one.”

Jonah shook his head. “Do
you want to elaborate on that?”

Tate smiled, a bit
mischievously. Then he got up and left without saying another
word.

In the
little while that Tate was gone, Jonah pondered what he thought was
the current game. Tate had been right on about Jonah’s angst, and
then he had come up with an explanation for David’s behavior that
relieved that angst somewhat.
He lured me
in
, Jonah thought. And why did Tate lure
you in? Why did he bring you close, with your defenses down? So he
could strike. By the time Tate was back, Jonah had prepared himself
for the bullshit he expected Tate to put forth.

Tate set an open beer in
front of Jonah, then took one of his own back to his seat on the
couch. Building tension was an integral piece in many of Tate’s
games. So Jonah was prepared for it when Tate didn’t speak
immediately. It was a few minutes later, the high setting in, that
Tate resumed play.

Tate said, “Our boy, David,
has something to protect.”

Getting stoned with Tate
every week for the last year, Jonah had become practiced with the
physical sensations. He no longer became paranoid when the initial
high set in, just excited. And now, he was pumped up for the mental
challenge of Tate’s mind games.

Tate said, “David is
protecting something he does on a daily basis, a way of life.” Tate
paused, staring at Jonah with the frozen look that Jonah almost
believed was Tate’s way of looking right inside him. Jonah tried to
show no reaction at all, but in his mind, he saw all the young
women at the meeting today, David’s staff. Why had David surrounded
himself with attractive women?

Tate prolonged the wait,
looking straight ahead, very casually. Jonah suspected Tate wanted
him to try and drag it out of him. But he wouldn’t. If Tate had a
weakness in his games, it was that he couldn’t hold what was inside
him for very long.

Tate finally said, “Yes,
David Meade has got it made. He’s got a ton of money and a handful
of drones to run his business for him. But a man like David is
never satisfied with economic abundance. He needs much more than
that. David’s got him a little action on the side.” Though Tate had
not outright said it, he thrust his elbows back and his pelvis
forward several times, showing Jonah that he knew what the action
was. After Tate stopped the motion, he said, “So tell me, bro, does
David have a lot of attractive women working for him?”

Jonah didn’t answer. He
just assumed that Tate already knew the answer to his own question,
and focused on trying to figure out how Tate could know this when
Jonah hadn’t even known before the meeting.

“Yeah, David has it made,”
Tate repeated, taking Jonah from the pondering of his stoned mind.
“But enter Jonah.”

Jonah didn’t say anything
in response, but it didn't matter, because Tate proceeded as if he
had.

Tate laughed. “Come on,
bro. Think about it. You come into the picture, all quiet and calm
looking.”

Tate was right about that.
The amazing thing about his OCD was that it caused him to give off
a false impression. Around people who intimidated him, women he was
attracted to, professors, bosses, Jonah’s obsessions would begin
firing. Then, trying to think of how to act and what to say while
being bombarded by a thousand thoughts, all Jonah could do was sit
there frozen or make brief statements. To others, at least from
what he had been told, the impression he gave off in this state was
coolness, his quietness being interpreted as calm and his brief
statements interpreted as genius with a concise nature.

“Quiet and calm,” Tate
repeated. Then he said, “This kind of makes you mysterious. But all
the while, in the back of David’s head, he’s got this
personification of you as the strong silent type, the classic Clint
Eastwood character,
sit-back-until-the-shit-hits-the-fan-then-come-up-firing
personification. And low and behold, all of the sudden the
mastermind he has suspected comes to the foreground. It’s not
David’s reports that are being used as examples, but
Jonah’s.”

To Jonah, Tate was doing no
more than taking the obvious, Jonah’s false persona, something
they’d discussed before, and using it to credit an otherwise weak
hypothesis. But Jonah wanted to see where Tate would go next, so he
said, “So you’re saying I intimidate him.”

“Not just that, bro,” Tate
responded. “You threaten him.”

“Threaten?”

“Sure, he’s been doing his
thing for years, loving it, the dominant male amongst desirable
women. And then it finally happens. Someone comes into the picture
more dominant than him. And more than that, this person is as cool
as a cucumber and won’t crack when David pressures him.”

“So he thinks I might take what he
has?”

Tate threw his hands to the
side and shrugged. “Kind of, bro. But he doesn’t really think that.
Most of this is going on at a subconscious level.”

“Oh really?” Jonah said. To
him, there was a surefire way to determine if a shrink didn’t have
faith in his or her own arguments. They used the term
“subconscious.”

Tate continued. “On a
conscious level, he just thinks that he’s got a really bright
employee who he doesn’t have to worry about and who makes his
clinic look good. But there’s something about this employee that
eats at him, and he can’t put his finger on it. That’s because, on
a subconscious level, he sees a more powerful male figure who could
potentially thwart his sexual fantasies.”

Jonah was surprised that
Tate would go Freudian on him, with so few psychologists doing that
in this day and age. “Oedipal Complex, Tate?” Jonah said in
disbelief. “Really?”

Tate nodded.

“So I’m Dad,” Jonah said,
laughing.

“Absolutely, bro. It’s just
like I said. David is good. He’s probably gone most of his life
being around contemporaries he could dominate. He’s probably been a
winner most of his life. So when, finally, a more powerful male
figure comes into the picture, it’s only natural that it will touch
off the one conflict in his subconscious that it resembles. In some
symbolic way, he’s going to treat you as he treated his
father.”

Jonah laughed hard. That
was the beauty of Freud. You could explain away anything at all
with his theory. “Fuck you!” Jonah said. “He’s going to treat me
like he treated his father in a symbolic way. What the fuck is
that?” Jonah laughed again, feeling the urge to continue laughing
that comes with a good high.

Tate spoke softly. “It’s
just the way I see it, bro.”

“Yeah, whatever. You’re
just intentionally being vague.”

“What do you mean, bro?”
Tate asked innocently.

“You know what I mean. You
say he’ll behave in a way that is symbolic of the way he treated
his father. But you don’t say how he treated his father. And we
both know that symbolically can mean just about anything. You’ll
wait until David does something else extraordinary in the future,
then you’ll relate that symbolically to David’s past actions toward
his father.”

Tate smiled. Jonah supposed
it was because he had just called Tate’s bluff. Then Tate said,
“All right, bro.” He paused for a few seconds and had a thoughtful
look on his face. Finally, he said, “David is a very successful
business man.”

Tate was right about that.
David’s Ph.D. was in clinical psychology, but he hadn’t made his
fortune by being an extraordinarily insightful shrink, so much as
he had made it by being a shrewd entrepreneur.

Tate said, “And in
psychology, you don’t get in his position unless you can get
contracts. And you get contracts by endearing yourself to the right
people.”

“All right, I’m listening,”
Jonah said, wondering if Tate would have the balls to make a
specific prediction.

Tate said, “So that tells
me that David is extraordinarily good with
identification.”

“All right,” Jonah said
again. Identification was basically a defense mechanism where a
person identified with a threat, befriended it. So if David had
reacted to the Alpha male, his father, by trying to befriend him,
and was successful, then it was feasible that he had actually
learned that befriending the right people was a way to get ahead in
life. But there was still a problem.

“All right, Tate,” Jonah
said. “But David has already done something to befriend me. So
you’re just taking something that already happened and making it
fit your bullshit theory. How scientific is that?”