The Past Life of Deidre

Contains sexual content, some swearing, and violence.

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Session 1: Doctor Hampton

“So, I understand that you’ve been having nightmares, Deidre,” said Doctor Hampton. 

“How do you know that?” Deidre said, tugging a lock of hair with a clenched fist. “I have privacy rights!”

“You are only fifteen, Deidre, and your uncle Gerald has commissioned me to help resolve your psychological affairs. He’s your guardian, Isn’t he?” 

“Oh, that old coot! He can’t be my guardian–Not sane enough. Didn’t you treat him when Auntie Bertram died? Well, I’ll tell ya! he’s still not cured; cause he walks around the house, all nervous like he’s got something to hide.” Deidre let out a nervous giggle staring at the yard beyond Doctor Hampton’s window. “And the old coot apologizes to every object he bumps into. That old diddler is not competent enough to be a guardian of the bats in his belfry.”

Doctor Hampton’s eyebrows rose, but he wasn’t amused. “Dear Deidre, we are not here to discuss your uncle Gerald; you are my patient, now.” Doctor Hampton took out a tape recorder and began recording. “Patient, Deidre Saltzer, Session 1,” he said. “Now, get up on the couch, Deidre. It’ll help relax you.”

“You mean the chaise lounge,” Deidre said as she stretched out, “A psych couch fit for Cleopatra. But now, I’m vulnerable!” Deidre put her arms behind her head and spread her legs. “You gonna take me now, Doctor? You know sexual repression is a big thing for you, therapists; maybe, I’m missing so much lust that it’s making me nervous and crazy deep in my core. Isn’t that what Freud, the fraud, says.”

“Aren’t you clever, Deidre! But I want to hear about your nightmares, not Freud or lust.”

“Why? They are just dreams. They don’t even scare me one bit,” Deidre said. 

“That’s not what your uncle says. He hears you screaming out in your sleep every night. Something is bothering you.” 

Doctor Hampton sat pensively scribbling on a pad of paper. He then folded his hands behind his head and tilted his chair back. “Come on, Deidre, tell me!”

“Nothing’s bothering me, Doc. It’s just the woman in my dreams screaming; it’s not me! If anything, old uncle cootie scares me more. Come on, Doctor, let’s get on with the show; I’ve got to get home to watch my friend Sally’s make-up tutorial on YouTube; it’s going live soon. So, either show me what Freud’s phallic symbol is about or let me outta here.”

“Deidre! Hush!”

Session 2: The Nightmare

The sun hit the plateau of the cliff with direct rays that kept the food in the picnic basket warm enough to endure. A couple glanced across the hazy horizon, not knowing what was out there. The man wore a black mask that covered his head from hairline to chin, save opening for eyes and a mouth. The woman wore a birthday suit, completely naked, from hairline to big toe. She opened one flap of the picnic basket and produced a baguette. The woman stroked it between her bare thighs, giggling girlishly.  

“Look, Hon, a penis!” The man looked away. 

The woman grabbed the man by the chin and turned his head back toward her. “Hon! What’s wrong? I’m horny! We’ve been married; what? Ten-years now! Can’t get it up? Too vulnerable? Too Gay?” Not enough testosterone to be a man?” He mumbled something and turned to look away once again. 

“When you were with my sister before we met, you could always get it up. She’s told me! She’s told me of the wild sex you’ve had with her. Oh, Yeah! And now that you are with me and she’s getting married to another man, you go limp?”

“Don’t talk about her! I don’t want to hear it!” The man said.

“I thought you wanted kids when we first married,” the woman said. My sister is getting married in a month, and I bet she will have kids before we do.  

“Good for your sister; I just don’t want to…,” the man mumbled.

“...have sex with me. Do you still have feelings for my sister? Are you still fucking her now?

“Don’t mention her!” the man said.

“Come on! Please! Honey! One day, I might just go off-road and get another man to fulfill my fantasies. What are you going to do then, Hon?”

“I really don’t care!” The man looked up unsympathetically. 

The woman took the baguette and flung it off the cliff. She then proceeded to press her body up against the man. “Oh! You want it, don’t you! I know you do!” She placed her breasts in the man’s face while holding his head firmly. The woman dug her fingernails under the neck of the mask and yanked at it, but it wouldn’t budge, too afraid to be vulnerable.

The man screeched. “Get off me! Bitch!” He crossed into the nether reaches of his subconscious mind, where insanity boils up to obscure clarity. The woman screamed as the man pushed her holding her hair, bare feet digging into jagged stones along the way. He bulldozed her toward the edge and gave her one final swift heave over the edge. “Your penis is down there,” he said, scowling like a beast. 

With every slap of the cliffside, the woman felt every ounce of blood squirt from her being. The last object she tasted before the final crush was the baguette coming up at her. 

The man walked away from the cliff. He stared at his palms as if they were Lady Macbeth’s.

Session 3: Gerald ‘The Coot’ Mackinnon

“How was the session?” Gerald said. 

Deidre ran across the foyer floor. “Sorry, old coot, gotta get upstairs! Sally’s on,” she said. She ran up the spiral staircase, feet pattering like a racehorse.

Gerald stood at the base of the staircase, squeezing his scalp. “Don’t call me that,” he said in a pip-squeaky voice. Gerald turned around, smashing his knee into the credenza at the landing. “Oh! So, sorry! Excuse me! Excuse me!” 

A loud giggle came from upstairs. “Hey, you old diddler, the buffet excuses you!” Deidre screamed down the stairs.

“I’ll be in the greenhouse if you need me, Deidre!”

“Go, old man, just leave me alone.”

“Deidre! Don’t be like that. I don’t need your lip!” Gerald scurried to the back patio door, almost limping.

Doctor Hampton was sitting on a chair in the greenhouse when Gerald entered. 

“Did you find out anything?” Gerald said as he ran his fingers along the stem of a ghost pepper.

“It’s not my job to….”

“I need to know what’s wrong with Deidre?” Gerald said, squeezing the pepper between his fingers. Gerald flung it away as the juice seeped into an old paper cut “ Shit! She scares me!” 

“Whoa! Mister Mckinnon, it’s not my job to find out anything for your pleasure.” Doctor Hampton passed a tissue to Gerald. “Deidre does have a right to patient confidentiality despite being a minor, you know.”

Gerald thumped his sternum in rapid succession. “It affects me, too! So I’m privy to what goes on!” he said with a blank, fixed stare.

“Gerald, I think it is you who needs to see me more than Deidre.”

“What!” Gerald’s eyes skirted around the foggy opaqueness of polyethylene as his feet shuffled dirt. “I don’t have a problem. She’s the one having the nightmares. She’s the one keeping me up at night, screaming and shouting! Now you are saying that….”

“It affects you, though!” Doctor Hampton took out a notepad from his vest pocket. “And it isn’t just about Deidre’s nightmares; something else is bothering you, something deep inside you! I think it has to do with Bertram’s death. I don’t think you’ve gotten over it, have you?. Give me a few sessions, and I will help you unravel what lies beneath.”

“It’s not Bertram, Doctor; It’s Deidre! Deidre’s the problem, and she scares me.”

“Why?” said Doctor Hampton, “Why does she scare you?”

 Because she reminds me of things, I don’t want to remember. Damn Diedre!”

Doctor Hampton tapped his lower lip with his gold pen. “Ok, Gerald, tell me more!”

“After Bertram died, Shawna had to drop her newborn, Deidre, at my front door and disappear. Why? I’ve had to face the memory of Bertram and Shawna all this time through Deidre’s eyes. It’s a double whammy.”

“So you blame, Deidre? It’s not her fault!”

“No! It’s not her fault, but I’m sorry for her being in my life. Her mother should have never left her with me. And what about her nightmares, Doctor!”

“I can’t find any underlying cause. Diedre’s life is normal, except for her heightened sexual suggestibility, which, I suspect, is hormonal. But one question I have, Gerald. Did Diedre ever know of Bertram’s death?”

“No! No!” Gerald said, sucking in a load of air. He looked away, pinching his jowls with tremendous pressure that left white marks on a blushed face. “No, She never knew her aunt. She was born after my wife died. What could Diedre know? It’s a closed case. Damn, Bertram! Why’d you have to stand so close to the edge? I’ll never know.” Gerald grasped one fisted hand and rocked it close to his chest. 

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Doctor Hampton said, looking at Gerald, sizing up his emotional state. “I am suggesting, however, to do a hypnotherapy session with Diedre. Sometimes, there are lost memories that get hidden beneath the surface. These memories are so buried in the subconscious that they can bubble up from time to time without the patient ever being aware.”

“You don’t need to do that, Doctor.” 

“That’s up to Deidre! Again, I am not treating her for your pleasure! And you know, with your defense mechanisms kicking like a wild bull, I’d say you’ve got something you are trying to hide!” 

Gerald picked up a claw hoe projecting from the roots of pearlwort. He heaved it directly up in front of Doctor Hampton’s face; The Doctor’s chair teeters backward. I’m done! If you don’t help me, I don’t want your help!

Doctor Hampton took a card from his vest pocket and tossed it at Gerald’s feet. “When your ire melts away, and you are ready to face your fear, give me a call?”

After seeing the Doctor drive away, Gerald slumped into a compost mound. He dug his nails into the nitrous oxide heap, stirring up warm fumes. As Gerald sat crying, he rubbed his face with a hand, unaware that in his self-loathing, he was spreading dung amongst the tears–he was a mess of a man.

Session 4: Hypnotherapy

“Ok! Deidre! I want to perform hypnosis on you. I am going to regress you to the time you were born to uncover any trauma that may have existed then.”

“Doctor, I don’t feel any trauma. I’m just a happy-go-lucky girl. How is hypnosis supposed to work? Wasn’t Mesmer a magician, anyway!” 

“No, he was a physician,” said Doctor Hampton. “And hypnosis works; the human mind is so complex that it can hide the most terrible things from you, things that happened to you that you don’t want to remember. But these things try to find a way to exit your subconscious through dreams, nightmares, nervous tics, neuroticism; you name it!”

“Doctor, I am not psychotic! And I have to be suggestible for you to mesmerize me” Deidre tilted her head back on the psych couch. She swept her hands down her body. “Now, if you are talking about the ‘phallic symbol,’ I might be suggestible.” Deidre laughed girlishly.

Session 5: The Regression

Shawna placed the stroller on the stoop in front of Gerald’s house. She lifted Deidre to her bosom and wiped a crust of goo from the corner of the child’s lips. The newborn wriggled her face out of the way. “I’m so sorry, Deidre!” Shawna said, sighing with a heavy breath. “He’s your father,” Shawna said, nodding at the door, eyes swelling with translucent mist. “And I’m so sorry, Bertram,” she said. “I defiled you, and so did Gerald. He could never give you a child as he gave me, but why did you jump, my dear sister? Why?” 

Shawna laid Diedre back into the stroller. She pulled a folded note from her purse and rested it next to the newborn’s head. “What have I done?” “What have I done?” she said, resting her head and arms on the door’s surface. After Shawna banged the knocker rapidly, she hurried away and hid in a side hedge. Gerald appeared. He looked down at the stroller and around the neighborhood, not quite making sense of anything. He rolled the stroller into the house. Shawna gasped as the tears came cascading; She whimpered as she walked away. 

Gerald read the note.

‘I am ashamed. So ashamed that you screwed me while you were married to Bertram, my sister. And now that she’s dead, I am so damn ashamed. I cannot live with myself or your memory, so I am giving Deidre to you to forget it all. You are the father. I can’t dispute it, and neither can you. Deidre was conceived before I married Bill, but I never had sex with Bill until we were married. I guess that leaves you, Gerald. I will never forgive myself. It’s as if I pushed Bertram over that cliff, and even if she jumped, who led her to the edge? And please, Gerald, don’t look for me because you will never find me, no matter how much you love me. Just treat Deidre right.’ 

***

Deidre woke from the deep hypnotic tranquility, but ironically she could only feel rolling sweat and fearful resentment. “He’s my father? The old coot is my father? It’s a slap in the face, Doctor. I’ve been calling him Uncle coots all this time, but the bastard is my father–A big scheming liar!”

Doctor Hampton, tapping his pen, was thinking pensively. “Listen, Deidre, would you be willing to do one more regression session? And this time, I want to take you back to a point before your conception.”

 “You are a man of science, Doctor. You don’t believe in past lives, Do you?”

“I don’t, but there have been many case studies of it in the literature so that it won't hurt. I just need your permission! I am sure we are both curious!”

Session 6: Past Life

“I know he still winks at you,” Bertram said. “I just hope you know how to keep your distance.”

Shawna shielded her eyes with a hand. “I can’t help if he still loves me, Bertram, but he knows I am getting married to Bill.”

 Bertram poured Shawna another cup of tea from the pot sitting on the doily mid-table. “That old coot can’t even get it up with me, Shawna, and I’ve read every book on how to please a man from ‘Cosmo’ to ‘Marie-Claire,’ and nothing works. I’ve even read ‘Freud and his stories about the ‘phallic’ symbol and how it relates to sexual tensions. And Gerald wants kids, but once he knows he has me, he can’t get aroused. But I bet he still gets aroused by you, Shawna!”

Shawna blushed at her sister’s suggestion. “You know, Bertram, I have nothing to do with Gerald’s attraction to me. I mean, do you want me to kick him in the testicles? Destroy his manhood? Maybe Gerald will come ‘round once I am married to Bill; he’ll know, then, that I’m taken and consider you a little more.”

“The old coot better come ‘round, ‘cause I am ready to burst. Every object shaped liked a phallus turns me on, from the legs on this table to that baguette over there.” Bertram pointed to the kitchen counter, giggling. “And it is all because Gerald won’t give me any; Oh! One day, I might even find myself a gigolo; A girl’s got to get satisfied somehow!”

Bertram placed her elbows on the table and folded her hands. Furtive glances formed in Shawna. “Just tell me, sister, that you will turn down every flirting word and gesture from Gerald; Please, give me that!” Bertram said, glaring at Shawna.

“I will! I will! You are my sister!”

***

Gerald knelt over the pearlwort, digging at the invasive weed. It had spread throughout the greenhouse, overcrowding the better plants. Even weedkillers could not destroy the evil spread. Gerald imagined that it would spread up his pant leg and prick into his bloodstream and invade his very own soul. 

“What?” He called out. Gerald felt the cold metal muzzle of a pistol propped up at his occiput. “Deidre?”

“No, Daddy; your widow, Bertram!” The one you murdered. “And poor Deidre! Could you never let her in on your dirty little secret? And poor mother, you shamed her into giving me away without knowing what really happened on that cliff!”

“Deidre, you’re confused!” 

“Am I? I bet you wanted to have sex with me like your sexually frustrated wife, but I guess in all these years, I reminded you of her, and you tried to forget, and you tried to cover it up like a masked man. Little did you realize, Daddy, just how intertwined our lives really are.” 

“Deidre! Snap out of it!”

“No, Daddy, you snap out of it.” Diedre pulled the trigger.