Folie a Deux Episode 03

Author's Note:Thanks to all those who read my previous chapters, to those who faved, and to those who commented. Your comments on Episode 2 were especially valuable, as they helped me clarify the presentation in a crucial way. I'm not sure whether it's considered good etiquette on this site to respond directly in the comments section in one's own story or not, so I figured I'd thank you all here. All feedback, whether positive or negative, is deeply appreciated.

Folie à Deux

Episode 3: Hunger

Over a black screen, we hear a woman's voice. Her diction is careful and precise and her voice carries a thick note of ambivalence. "There are lines no person should cross. And if one is forced across those lines, one shouldn't linger there. The lines are there for a reason, and when one erases them...bad things start to happen."

We now see the speaker, a blonde woman of about 40 years. She has remarkable features, almost Classically Grecian in their chiseled perfection. Her dark eyes are large and intelligent, her mouth wide and full. Her blonde hair hangs in wavy, untameable strands to her shoulders. She is wearing an elegant, plum-colored, Y-neck silk blouse.

We see her name given as

Emily Larsen.

"What was between my son and me began as violation forced upon us by thugs, but it wasn't that anymore," she continues. "We had taken that violation and made it a thing of our own volition. We had become our own victimizers...and more specifically, perhaps, I had become my son's victimizer."

We now see a title card in white letters against a black background:

Folie à Deux

Episode 3: Hunger

After a few moments, the title card is replaced by one reading:

June 28

The title card vanishes, replaced by the face of a handsome young man in his early 20s. The familial resemblance to Emily is clear, with the same high cheekbones, sculpted jawline, and pointed and cleft chin. His mouth is a bit smaller and his eyes are a shade of blue reminiscent of Paul Newman's eyes. His hair is dark brown, straight, and cut in a no-nonsense short style.

His name is shown to be

Mike Larsen.

"I had it rough the night after we did it on the couch," he tells us in a rich, smooth voice. "I couldn't stand myself. I couldn't stand to be in my own skin. I felt filthy and sick. My mom and I had fucked each other like wild animals, like maniacs. I mean, as soon as dad and Olivia left and mom and I were there alone, there was no way we were getting out of that room without fucking. We had to. And that was the worst feeling I've ever had."

During what follows, as in the previous episodes, only one person is visible at a time -- plainly they were interviewed individually and clips from each interview were stitched together to make a narrative whole.

Emily again. "Bob had given me a whole Xanax that night. Normally I only take half a pill when I take it at all, but a whole pill put me to sleep all night long. I had no dreams that I remembered when I awoke that morning. When I awoke I was in the haze of a drug hangover, and for a several minutes I laid in bed with a sort of vague apprehension but no concrete memory to hang that feeling onto. Eventually, though, I remembered why my genitalia felt pleasantly bruised."

"And then?" The female interviewer from Episode 1 is back.

Emily cocks her head thoughtfully. "It is...interesting how massive, crushing guilt looks through the gauze of a narcotic hangover. The guilt is horrific and very obviously painful, but it's held at an arm's length so one may view it with...not objectivity, precisely, but at a distance. When one is immersed in guilt it feels like a sea of quicksand, a glutinous mass that holds one in place and forces one to relive the sin over and over again. However, from a distance it more resembles an iron maiden."

"An iron maiden?" the interviewer asks.

"Yes. It looks like an iron maiden with the doors gaping open. One knows one must enter. One sees each spike and can tell where it will pierce one's flesh when the doors are closed. But because it's being held at a distance, the feeling it evokes is abstract dread rather than immediate misery. I spent the first two hours of that morning lying in bed and contemplating where those spikes would drive into me when the drug wore off and the doors closed."

We see a man of approximately 40, handsome, with icy blue eyes and short, straight, dark hair that is going gray at the temples. His name is given as

Bob Larsen.

"I'd left Emily and Mike alone the day before so they could work things through," he tells us, "but when I got home Emily had a breakdown and Mike was nowhere to be found. I'd had to drug Emily to get her to sleep. I was tired of all this nonsense. I wanted it resolved, or at least out in the open where we could deal with it. And I wanted the damned hallway finished."

"Emily had begun painting the hallway between the mud room and the kitchen," the interviewer supplies.

Bob nods. "It needed to be finished, and I wasn't going to do it. But more than that, I wanted the tension in the house gone. I was starting to think of it like a boil, something that needed to be lanced and drained even though it might stink at first."

"Did you have any more idea of what the problem was?" the interviewer asks.

Bob sighs heavily. "Not really. Well, not at all. The fact that my wife and our son had had sex twice never entered my mind. But I was starting to think something very bad had happened -- a crime, maybe."

"A crime? What sort of crime?"

Bob shrugs. "I didn't know. I thought maybe Mike had stolen something from one of Emily's friends. I thought she'd found out he was involved in drugs. I thought...well, I thought that maybe the wreck of the minivan was because of a hit and run accident, that maybe they'd killed someone out in the middle of nowhere and were cracking up because of it."

"Did you think that was likely?" the interviewer asks.

"No," Bob admits, "but I knew it was serious. And even now, it sounds like a likelier explanation than what really happened."

Mike again. "I knew dad had reached his breaking point. I don't even think it was mom breaking down that did it, I think it was the hallway. For some reason that really got under his skin. I came downstairs for breakfast and he lit right into me, yelling at me about the night before and the hallway -- which, I want to point out, I had nothing to do with -- and wanting to know what was going on. No way I was gonna tell him that, so I told him I'd finish the hallway. I thought that would calm him down, but he just kept going at me for another few minutes before he went upstairs to check on mom."

We then see a photograph of a pretty girl who generally resembles Bob, except with Emily's blonde mane, which she wears pulled back into a ponytail. She is wearing a highschool cheerleader's uniform. Her name is given as

Olivia Larsen.

After a few seconds, the still image is replaced by grainy footage of a women's lacrosse game between Boston College and Harvard. A single Boston College player is circled and then zoomed in upon, with the footage getting correspondingly grainier. We see the text, "

Four days before the filming of this episode, Olivia Larsen sustained an injury during a game of lacrosse."

Moments after this text appears, we see Olivia turn her head to look back as she's running, which unfortunately causes her to miss the fact that a Harvard player has leaped in front of her. Olivia takes the other player's knee directly to the middle of her face, which we see as the film freezes for a moment.

We then see Olivia. Her nose is bandaged and her eyes are blackened. She has changed her hair color since her high school days, opting for a candy apple red, which hangs in dramatic, loose strands below shoulder length. The overall effect is somewhat reminiscent of a raccoon which has been set on fire, but she doesn't appear daunted or ashamed by the injury she bears; in fact, her bearing is one of cocky, tough-girl pride.

When she speak, her voice is rather nasal due to her nose injury. "I wasn't as pissed off as dad was by the weirdness between mom and Mike, but then I was pretty self-absorbed back then. But I definitely noticed it. I mean, how could I not? I was at the breakfast table when dad unloaded on Mike that day, and I was like, 'Damn dad, chill, it's not like Mike killed anybody.'"

"Did you say that?" asks the interviewer.

Olivia chuckles. "No! I wasn't going to stick my neck out for Mike then, especially when I didn't know what was going on. But I did think that maybe I should try to find out what the deal was so we could get everything all settled down."

Bob again. "I went upstairs to check on Emily. She was awake but too groggy to talk, so I kissed her, told her I'd call her at lunch, wished her a good day, and left for work."

"I wasn't quite as groggy as I pretended to Bob," Emily admits, "but I wasn't in any condition to talk about the situation, if for no other reason than in my befuddled state I was likely to blurt something I shouldn't have. I told him I loved him and to have a good day."

"Once dad was gone, I asked Mike what was up," Olivia tells us as she reappears. "I knew that my style could be a little, um, grating on him, so I tried to tone it down."

Mike appears again, saying, "I was surprised when Olivia asked me nicely what was up. We weren't talking much in those days except to fight. And it was funny, because that actually made a bigger impression on me than dad did with all his yelling. It was like, if Olivia is being pleasant to me then this has gotten out of control. I knew I had to talk to mom once she was up and around."

"He told me that things had gotten heated the night before with mom," Olivia says, and then adds with a smirk, "Turns out he was telling the truth, but not the whole truth. Anyway, he said that he'd been a jerk to her and he was planning to apologize that day and get things settled down. I think I actually told him I loved him, which I totally do, but I don't think I'd said it since I was ten."

Mike reappears, still looking surprised. "Yeah, she said she loved me. I wouldn't have been more shocked if she'd said she was running off to be a nun. She grew up a lot when she went off to college, but back then she was pretty hard to take, so her saying that was cool. Awkward, but cool."

"So then I was like, 'Good, problem solved!'" Olivia laughs. "I seriously thought that was the end of it, like all I had to do was tell Mike to deal with it and it would be dealt with. So then I went off to do my day and was all pleased with myself."

"Once Olivia left, I got to finishing up the hallway," says Mike. "It wasn't a big job or anything, so I was just cleaning up when Mom came wandering downstairs."

"I felt as though I still had a head full of cotton," says Emily as we see her again, "but I couldn't stay in bed any longer. I wasn't sure if I was alone in the house. I knew Bob was at work, of course, and I knew Olivia would be off with her friends in the morning and then to her job at Arby's in the afternoon. Mike's summer job, helping a family friend with his landscaping business, was more unpredictable, and I wasn't positive whether he had to work that day or not. I had no work that day, but I could hardly hide in in the bedroom from my own son for the rest of my life, and of course I was hungry as well, so I wrapped myself in my bathrobe and went to the kitchen to make some toast."

"I'd cleaned everything up and was just heading for the shower when I literally bumped into mom coming around the corner," Mike says. "She was in a sort of daze, from the Xanax I guess, and she walked face-first right into my chest before she even realized I was there. I sort of grabbed her. It was a reflex, I took hold of her to keep her from falling down, right? But the first time I see her after we fucked and I immediately throw my arms around her. Like, not what I woulda planned."

"As slowed as I felt, I didn't even register that I had walked into Mike before his arms went around me." says Emily. "I gazed up at him rather stupidly, I confess, before the awkwardness of the situation really struck me."

"What did you say?" the interviewer asks.

"I said good morning."

Mike again. "She kind of mumbled a good morning at me. She was a little out of it. I let her go and stepped back kinda quickly. She said she needed toast. I had paint on my face. I let her pass to the kitchen."

"It was advantageous to be so befuddled,: Emily observes. "Walking into Mike's arms as soon as I got out of bed would have panicked me otherwise. As it was, I could simply be glad that we didn't fall into a lustful kiss. And, I must say, a breakfast of bread and fruit, and especially strong coffee, did wonders to clear my mind."

"It wasn't like I was turned on, but I took a cold shower anyway," says Mike. "A long, cold shower. Then I came down and had a long, rational talk with mom."

"I was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold, simply lost in thought, when Mike came in," Emily says. "He sat down across the table from me and said, in a very rational and calm voice, 'Mom, we need to talk.' Of course we needed to talk, so that was what we did."

"I'm not sure why we could be rational and open about it in the morning, when the day before we'd danced around the subject and then fucked," Mike muses. "Maybe we just blew off enough steam the day before that we could see it in a more realistic way, or maybe, like, enough time had passed since we first did it? Or like, we needed to do it again before we could make sense of it? I don't know. It just seemed to fall into place."

"Mike began by telling me that he loved me," Emily relates. "He said it with a directness and a sincerity that very much put me at ease. It was exactly the right thing to do. I told him I loved him as well, and he assured me that he knew that."

"She said that she was proud of the way I'd handled myself with the bikers, and that I'd saved both our lives there," he says. "I said I was just as proud of her, and that if I saved her, she saved me just as much."

Emily again, smiling gently. "After all the stress of guilt and avoidance, after all the recrimination and the suffering we'd put each other through over the past few days, it was such a profound relief to have a calm, mature, and sensible talk! I told him that the pleasure we'd taken in it was nothing to be ashamed of -- we simply didn't need to feel guilt for it. It had been forced upon us and we'd made the best of it, so there could be no shame attached to it. Certainly it would not have been better had it been painful and unpleasant for us both."

"She brought up the fact that it was good, which, like, took this massive load off, you know?" Mike says. "'Cause it was awesome, but I wasn't gonna just throw that out there with my mom, right? But when she laid it out, I could agree that, yeah, it had been great sex. It wasn't like I was supposed to know my mom was a great lay, but I did and there was nothing I could do about it, so in the light of day I was like, yeah I know this, and it gives me a better appreciation of who you are as a person. Even if it's weird that I had that appreciation, it was still something that was good about her, not something bad. So I could take that and love her all the more because I knew it."

"Of course it felt good to hear that!" Emily laughs. "It felt wonderful! It was such a relief to hear him put it in those terms. And him saying it allowed me to realize, and to tell him, that I was delighted that he would be able to keep my future daughter-in-law, whomever she might be, happy in that manner. It made me prouder of the man he had become."

"In spite of the talk about sex -- and it got fairly...direct there, it wasn't a sexual talk," Mike says. "I mean...it was a

sexual

talk, but it wasn't a

sensual

talk. Neither of us were getting turned on or tempted to do anything again. It was like, 'Hey, you're awesome,' 'Oh, you're awesome too, that's cool to know.' Which was

great.

It felt sooooo good to be able to lay it out there, because once it was out in the open we could just stop feeling shame. We recognized it, we said it, we could move on and put what we'd done behind us."

The interviewer asks Emily, "Did you discuss what you did the day before, and why?"

"We did, of course," Emily nods. "We both came to the conclusion that we had done what we had done because we were trying so hard to avoid dealing with our actions and the feelings they aroused. We attached no blame, we simply agreed that it had been the result of repressed emotions expressing themselves unhelpfully, and now that we had addressed things, there would be no more of that. We both felt entirely confident of that conclusion, and of course we were both mostly wrong about the causes and entirely wrong about the future. We couldn't know that then, of course."

"It sounds like I hear a 'but' in there."

Emily immediately opens her mouth to contradict, but closes it again. In a moment she says, in a very thoughtful tone, "If I am being entirely truthful, I must admit that a part of me knew that we weren't addressing the issue completely honestly. Mike, of course, couldn't have known that because of his age and relative inexperience. I, however, was old enough to know better, even though I wasn't willing to admit that at the time."

"I thought we were solving it," Mike concedes. "I thought we were laying it all out and once that was done we'd never have to deal with wanting each other anymore, ever again. But, like, when we put our bodies together they didn't just throw off sparks, they burst into flames. We couldn't just walk away from that and expect to live together and see each other every day and expect it not to happen again. But I didn't know that then."

"We talked for quite some time," Emily says, "and long before the end, things had become quite lighthearted. We began to joke and laugh about various things that had happened on the trip -- not about the incident with the bikers, of course, but about things that had happened with the people we visited or in San Francisco. We joked about our irrationality. We even joked about the accident, although Lou's demise was still something of a tender spot for me. It was during that period that Bob called."

"I'm not even sure I expected Emily to be out of bed," Bob tells us. "I expected things to keep heading from bad to worse. But Emily answered the phone in a chipper voice. Mike was in the room and they were talking and laughing and joking around. She said that they'd had a really good talk and settled things between them, and this time I believed her. Like I said, she's the worst liar in the world, and this time I could tell she meant what she said. And I hear Mike chipping in from the background. When I hung up the phone I actually felt relaxed for the first time since the wedding. It took a huge load off my mind."

"When I finished talking with Bob, I asked Mike what he planned to do that day," Emily says. "He said he was going to see Miss Williamson." There is something cautious and deliberate in how she says that name that suggests she's concealing something.

We see a photograph of a lovely, petite redhead in her late teens. She is smiling hugely and her lively green eyes suggest intelligence and playfulness. It is labeled

Hannah Williamson.

"Hannah was a girl I'd liked for a couple of years, but things just never worked out for us to get together," we hear Mike say. "But this was the time if ever there was a time, so I wanted to call her and see if we could get together."

"Was there more to it than that?" the interviewer asks.

After a moment, Mike nods. "Yeah. I mean, sure there was. I needed to get mom out of my mind and I couldn't do that hanging around the house. I needed to get out and do stuff. And I needed to do stuff with a girl to get me past what mom and I'd done. It didn't have to be sex, but it had to be fun, hanging out, doing stuff, like, laughing and being teenagers, right? Like, it had to be

normal.

I had to do normal stuff with a normal girl to get past the weirdness."