THE MERCI KILLINGS: PART TWO.

He was a man built around obsessions. Subjects that would undoubtedly crop up in all of our sessions (after the initial trust exercises) included spiders, his physical wellbeing and a woman called Ava. When he first mentioned Ava I made sure to not fuss over it. Dropping it in flippantly in a later session was the best way to go.
He described her as having long brunette hair, beautiful eyes and ‘the best set of blowjob lips’ he had ever seen. He recounted a time when his mother had walked in on them having sex, and he had pulled the duvet over them both, so it appeared like he was levitating, but most importantly, alone in his room. He laughed at this memory, and a serene smile came across his face when he told me that his mother had never confronted him on it. It was only after around ten more sessions that Oscar told me Ava was a blow up doll.
This revelation wrote off all of my thoughts on his relationship with Ava, and I unprofessionally became rather angry about the wasted time. I had of course been paid for these sessions, but I wanted to help him, without trickery or lies such as this. The only good that came of it was the unexpected reveal that Oscar also spoke to his friends of Ava as a real-life girlfriend. This showed progress in our relationship, with him telling me the truth whilst lying to his friends. I counselled him on how he thought of women, and made him draw his ideal woman. This was mostly to distract him from the weight of the next activity, which would also include drawing.
The female form was of course a love of his. He drew his perfect woman in such detail – shading under the breasts, discreet make-up and realistic hair. The woman was obviously what my father would call ‘a real dollybird’; hourglass body, heaving bosoms and Oscar’s favourite ‘blowjob lips.’ In his diary this occasion is well documented.

August 24th 2003.

Today my counsellor made me draw my perfect woman. As per usual, I struggled to show what feelings I actually had towards love and sex et al and instead opted to draw the man’s man’s ideal. One of those Playboy chicks, who would fuck you if you had enough money in the bank or even just in your wallet. Truth is I hate those women. They’re stuck in the 50s with the whole ‘cook your man a meal’ mentality. When a girl says they’re dressed up for themselves it is bullshit. All women want sexual attention all the time. Even the taken ones. I think that’s why I’m so awful with girls – the majority of them, I completely despise. There’s no humanity, just cheap thrills.
Not that I am actually better than that. I crave attention in all areas, forever. I sometimes think that this counselling lark is only necessary because nobody wants to interview me. I want love on major scales to the point of hysteria. Beatlemania.
I don’t think I’m asexual, because I’ve never had sex, but I think I easily could be. I think I fear sex. I know how judgmental and shallow people can be, and so losing your virginity must be putting that all out on a plate for the world to see via the receiver. That’s not true for women though, unless they’re with a massive cunt of a man who describes every millimetre of her vagina to their friends. Women are mostly expected to lie back and take it. Most times I don’t think the man even sees her genitalia.
The counsellor gave me this homework assignment – I have to draw my own personal paradise. Why all the drawing? I hate my drawing. I try to draw realistic humans but the end result is slightly wonky, so that the picture looks like my intention after weeks and weeks of crystal meth addiction.

That personal paradise he mentions was the next assignment I previously mentioned. I could speak of that picture forever, analysing it to shreds. It was the complexity of it that first struck me. It was like a great film that every time you watched you saw something new.
The undertones of sexual frustration were there once again. Coconut trees, monkeys, nude sunbathers - all flooded the A4 snapshot of his psyche. Yet the most interesting part was the waterfall. It is not unusual for a waterfall to be included in a ‘paradise.’ It represents an individual’s goals and desires, and can symbolise beauty and grace. Behind Oscar’s waterfall was a cave. This was not unusual, but he had drawn things invisible to the human eye inside that cave. I asked him to draw in detail what was in the cave.
In Oscar’s usual way, he tried to take away the gravity of the situation by making it vulgar, drawing the cave as a vagina-shaped crevice in the wall behind the waterfall. When he saw that I was disappointed and bored of his childishness, he set about drawing the contents of the cave. Within that cave, he drew himself.
From what I have learnt in many years of psychology training, this could have meant one of two things. The first is that Oscar felt detached from paradise, that the waterfall separated him from his idea of perfection. The other is that his goal is to discover himself, and who he is.
Not wishing to bullshit the patient in the middle of a breakthrough, I asked Oscar which idea felt nearer to the truth. He spoke quietly, cautiously and honestly when he told me that both seemed quite true. He felt however that they went hand in hand. He said, quite bluntly, that because he did not know of his purpose or place in the world, he could not reach that paradise.
I spoke to him about myself for a short while, hoping to relax him with a story he could relate to. The truth is that I had had no idea what I wanted to do until I was 18. At that age you have to take a jump into university or straight into a job, and I felt that no day-to-day job would suit me. I lucked out when taking psychology at university, which at the time I was unsure of, and loved it.
I said he need not think so submissively about the future. It’s what you make of it, I told him. There’s no instinctive gene that says what your life’s purpose is, and philosophers have been mulling over the meaning of life in general since basically the dawn of time. He seemed to acknowledge what I had said, but the diary entry that day was perhaps a sign of an internal dispute of Oscar’s.

August 31st 2003.

The counsellor told me that there’s no master plan for human beings. This implies atheism on his part, and I think that might have been a dangerous thing of him to say. I am currently uninterested in the idea that nothing has any meaning, because that means I am disposable. And some people might say that makes them feel free, but that makes me fucking terrified. Sure it’s probably nice to think that once you’re doing something – it allows you to change jobs and stuff – but I don’t do anything yet.
I ordered a Qu’ran, a Bible and the Tibetan Book of The Dead today. I need something to believe in. Humanity is nothing to believe in. Love still has a chance to be the unifying religion, but so far there are no signs of its existence to me. I don’t believe in a God, but I do believe in an afterlife, just as meaningful as the present life supposedly can be. I just want to find some more perspectives. Buried under all the homophobia, sexism and squalor in those books there must be some hope.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the third reference to The Beatles so far. John Lennon read the book during the recording of Revolver, and Tomorrow Never Knows is based on some of its contents. Along with Mark Chapman and the idea of ‘Beatlemania’ this forms Oscar’s subtle influence from The Beatles. Charles Manson was infamous for having believed The White Album was a message for him to start a race war. This bears negligible relevance. It’s just a fact that interested me.