Alternative Content: Pandora's Tissue Box
By Clarissa Pabi / Spinebreakers Crew
The parallelograms of green and orange in Pandora’s eyes looked out of focus as she went down the balustrade staircase of the Hotel. She stopped. Perfunctorily opened the door and went into her room. It all looked very El Greco-esque, the bed, the chandelier, everything looked distorted. Opal drops of NaCl were falling from her eyelashes. Shit, the waterworks were broken again. Pandora opened her box. The makeup one, sitting on top of the Marie Antoinette wardrobe, and began emptying it. The bric-a-brac of lipstick, mascara and cocaine was all that was holding her together. And yet it bamboozled her that she was crying. The sex hadn’t been that bad, she had had worse. For a transient second she thought of Epimetheus, and then the granules of cocaine got ride of that ugly thought. Epimetheus had definitely been the worse. No, it must have been something else. Frustrated and tired she knocked the over a vase, and stood like Narcissus staring in the ornate framed mirror. “What a mess” she said, and she wasn‘t thinking about the ceramic polygons and garish flowers on the floor.
Dr Saxe had told her to lie down, and she tersely replied “No”. He looked hard at her, frowned, and then his sere-cigarette-ash coloured eyebrows relaxed as though he had understood something. The Psychoanalysist instead asked her to sit, and she did so, blithely. The electric blue of her high heel went up as she slowly crossed her legs. Nothing happened. Surreptiously she took out the broach in her hair, but he just carried on writing. Blonde curls cascaded down her top and framed her 34’DD breasts, but Dr Saxe did not remove his eye from his sheet paper.
She had imagined the walls would have been white, washed in alabaster coloured paint. The room she thought would be minimalist in design: a table, the Doctors chair, and plain quack’s couch. But this wasn’t the case. Pandora had been pleasantly surprised when she had walked into a room with ornate furniture, an intricate rug, colourful chinoiserie wallpaper, and a cocoa brown couch. It was very gay. Immaculately gay. “Dr Saxe, I see you have book about Electra. Greek myths, fascinating aren‘t they? Where would we be without the Greeks, without Freud and those other men”. Dr Saxe looked at the bookcase embossed to the wall behind him. She smiled like some dilettante, he could tell she wasn’t interested in Freud or Jung or Lacan for that matter. The old man stood up and looked unblinkingly into her face “Miss Pandora, it is imperative that you understand I cannot help you unless you help yourself. Psychoanalysis takes, as they say, ‘two to tango’. What you are doing is childish, and is an incontrovertible a waste of both your and my time. I can only help you when are willing to let me in, and there is no sexual innuendo that. The mind is an incorporeal box Pandora. I can only show you how to unlock it. You must choose whether you wish to open it or not.”
And so she did. She opened it. “I was nine. And Hephaestus my father went as you might say, “absent without leave”. My mother, an alcoholic, was always somewhere other than the house. She was drunk one night, paralytic, whatever you want to call it, and my step father took it upon him self to put me to bed. He came into my room and he…he told me to lie down and he put..” Pandora looked coyly in the direction of an African-piacasso-esque mask, hanging on the wall. She couldn’t do it. How could she relate the misfortunes of her world to this man? What good would it do bring out the dismembered skeletons? Talk was cheap, we’re in a fucking credit crunch, so what was the point of talking? It wouldn’t change anything. Aphrodite the Fagan-esque pimp, the drugs, and the bourgeois flat, were all part of what was killing her. But she wanted to heal, she needed to and the quizzical look on her face would not tell Dr Saxe that. The first tear fell, and then the tsunami started. Dr Saxe took something from his desk and placed a rectangular box in her hand. “Here my dear, I have always found that in times like these, the catharsis starts with Kleenex.” She looked up into grandfather clock of his face. And replacing her erzat smile with a genuine one, she said “thank you”. And although she did not let him know it, it was the first time she some one had made her smile in a long time.