Read Last Night at the Circle Cinema for Free Online

to scream. “I know. I know that. I’m just thinking about his fondness for hide-and-seek and sardines and flashlight tag and maybe—”
    â€œMaybe,” Codman interrupted, coming closer to me, “you should go down that hallway—to the left. And I should take the right. The hallways meet on the other side of Theater 6, right? We can see what’s here.”
    My heart beat way too fast.
    â€œCome on,” Codman said to me. “You only live once, right?”

8
    Codman
    I watched Olivia head off to one of the myriad snaking hallways on her side of the theater and realized she wasn’t coming back to the gallery. This was either because she wasn’t scared like I was or because she was but didn’t want to tell me or—and this was worst of all—because she couldn’t stand to be around me anymore. She probably regretted going through with the night. My parents—both psychiatrists who had met through my mom’s first husband, also a shrink—would say I was transferring, and that any regret was probably my own. I put my head down and focused on the stunningly ugly paisley carpet as I walked away from bad art toward a worse fate.
    The hallway, like tunnels in the dreams my father picked apart for clues, seemed to lead nowhere. I tried to remember the last time I’d been here, what movie we’d seen, what season, anything to get my mind off the sure feeling that terror was lurking behind each corner, waiting to find me if I stopped or if I kept going. I couldn’t go back to where Olivia and I had been, and I couldn’t go forward.
    â€œWhat do you want from me?” I asked aloud to no one or maybe to Bertucci if he could hear me. “What’s the plan, Nut Nozzle?”
    I half-expected someone to respond, but when they didn’t, and a door up and to the right creaked partway open and then shut, I felt my pulse quicken to the point where I thought I might pass out. It doesn’t take much for my inner wuss to break free. I had all the courage of a maxi pad.
    But I knew if I passed out, no one would find me, and I’d be left to rot in the Circle Cinema which is just about as pathetic a way to go as any, so I began to recite Freud, explaining to the walls and carpet what I believed to be true.
    â€œFreud thought everyone has these two desires, right?” I stuck out one hand in the darkness as I padded slowly along, using my other hand to feel the wall. “There’s the libido—not just sex as we think of it, but the life force, like hunger and surviving and ... sex.” I paused as my fingers hit something cold. A handle. I gripped the metal and heard my breath coming in shaky gasps. “But then there’s also the death drive. Um, Thanatos, who is, like, the Greek personification of death.”
    I opened the door and found a room in semilight. Relief flooded through me as I could see again and make sense of where I was. Not that I knew where I was, but at least I could identify that I was in a bathroom.
    â€œNot that Freud used Thanatos exactly. See, Freud’s hypothesis was sort of about libido being a form of energy, right, Nutjam?” Bertucci had spent hours combing my parent’s bookshelves, reading my mother’s thesis, “On Death and Sexism.”
    I stopped to look at myself in the mirror, aware that in horror movies, looking in the mirror never turned out well—exactly at that moment, someone or something would appear in the reflection.
    But no one did. I noticed though that there was a urinal in the corner, crying out to be used, so I went over to it and closed my eyes. Closed my eyes? Yes. Always have. Call Freud! Maybe my dad sighs and closes his eyes when he takes a leak, I don’t really know. Never stopped to consider why, really, until Bertucci commented on it a couple of years back when we were next to each other in the school bathroom.
    â€œAre you about to critique my