Read Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die for Free Online Page B

your knees? And then grabbed your ankles and held your feet in the air while I shove about eight stiff ones right up your juicy twat? How do I deal with that?”
    The pencil she held between her fingers was flexible; instead of snapping, it bent into a broad V. She got up and walked to the window, stood with her back to him. A squirrel chittered in the fork of a pin-oak tree. He saw smoke from a diesel rig pluming up through the cut of the interstate a mile away.
    “You know what’s going to happen to you?” She turned. “You’ll be staffed next Wednesday. You’ll be returned to the county jail, and you’ll stand trial. I don’t know what will happen in court, but the paper said they found two hundred and seventy-some pounds of marijuana growing not far from your cabin.”
    “They weighed it wet. With dirt on the roots.”
    “Never mind that. They’re going to try you on a felony charge. You could get ten years.”
    “Whaddaya mean, I could get ten years? You mean I I could lose ten years. On top of that my whole life is fucked up, I don’t vote, I don’t get a passport, I don’t get a decent job, and on top of
that
I get a bunch of fat-assed jock-strap smellers coming around every month to find out why I can’t make it in this wonderful society—”
    “That’s exactly my point.”
    “What is your point? I missed it.”
    “Just that it’s time you took some responsibility for your life. Don’t you think so? All the things you’ve done since coming here—stirring up the patients, faking amnesia, refusing to participate in our rehabilitation program, and this last rather pointless, vulgar outburst—none of this is going to make any difference. It happens all the time. We’ve got a name for it.”
    “Name for what?”
    He was smiling, his lips tilted, mocking.
    “For that kind of activity—faking psychosis in order to escape responsibility.”
    “So what is this name?”
    “Ganser’s syndrome.”
    He laughed. “You’ve got labels on everything, haven’t you” Got one on me yet?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Schiz?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I’ve got the symptoms. Separation of mind-body. I go out through my right ear. Then I float around in the air and look down the front of women’s dresses. Like I’m looking down the front of yours right now, Elizabeth. You’ve got nice boobs, you know that?”
    She clamped her lips into a tight line, walked back to the chair and picked up her pencil. “I’ve only got a few more minutes. Let’s try to use it productively. You were … uh, wading into the pond, breaking ice ahead of you with a stick. Would you like to proceed from there?”
    “You know, I never heard anybody your age talk so square.”
    Her head came up sharply. “What age do you think I am?”
    “Twenty-five.”
    “I’m thirty-one.”
    “And still a virgin.”
    She gave a short, humorless laugh. “Hardly. I was married for three years.”
    “And you divorced him?”
    “He died.”
    “Oh. Sorry.” That’s a lie, he thought, but what should I say?
So what?
He cleared his throat and draped one knee over the other. “Well, those first months in the woods I didn’t miss dope because it took all my mind to stay alive. But then I built the cabin. I can identify that as my first mistake. Then the Learned Doctor came up from Mexico, carrying my books and records and everything else he’d salvaged from the bust. Pretty soon I was reading Yoga instead of practicing it. And to get music I had to bring electricity into the cabin. When I got high I’d see that black wire and realize I’d done the very thing I’d gone to the woods to avoid. I’d plugged myself into the machine.”
    She looked up from his folder. “You got high? I thought you were trying to kick.”
    “I was. I did. This was just weed—some very highgradegrade stuff from San Luis Potosi. The Learned Doctor had a bag which he split with me. There wasn’t much, so I used it very sparingly. Weed’s no problem