23 comments/ 55033 views/ 51 favorites Folie a Deux, Episode 01 By: Senor_Smut Folie à Deux Episode 1: The Breakdown The screen is black as we hear a woman speak. Her voice is strong, certain, and decisive, her accent that of the Upper Midwest, her diction precise and educated. "Of course I remember every detail. I'll remember them until the day I die. June 18th began very happily. It didn't end that way." The screen is taken up with a close-up of a woman against a black background. She is white, in her early 40s, and strikingly beautiful in a manner almost Classical. Her jawline is powerful and bold, tapering down sharply to a pointed and very slightly cleft chin. Her cheekbones are almost theatrically high, while her nose, though well-formed, is perhaps a touch too prominent. Her mouth is generously wide and her lips are full. Her eyes are large, dark brown, and intelligent, and her eyebrows arch imperiously. Her hair is shorter than shoulder-length and dark blonde, and hangs in unruly locks that show extreme natural waviness; it's clear that she would need to take extreme measures to make her hair obey even the slightest command. Her makeup is understated and dignified for the most part, though her lip liner is a shade darker than her lipstick and deliberately accentuates the striking arcs of her mouth. She looks her age, though she also looks well preserved. A long, graceful neck disappears into a wide-collared dark green blouse. A subtitle appears: Emily Larsen. "It was...the culmination of a series of mistakes," she says judiciously, her lips in a tight line and her eyes revealing a series of conflicting emotions that flash past too quickly to recognize them. "Some of them were made that day, some were made earlier. Some we made before the trip. Most of them we didn't think anything of when they happened. Obviously we never could have anticipated what would occur, or...the consequences. But that's always the way. One little mistake leads to another and another and then before you know what's happening you're in so deep you can't back out." The screen goes black and the title card appears: Folie à Deux Episode 1: The Breakdown The title card is replaced by a closeup on the face of a handsome young man in his early 20s. The familial resemblance to Emily is clear. The overall shape of the face is the same, with the same high cheekbones, bold jawline, and pointed and cleft chin. His mouth is narrower and his lips are thinner, however, and his eyes are a striking, almost shocking pale blue. The biggest difference, however, is his hair, which is dark brown, straight, and short. Unlike the woman, his ears are visible, and he sports a small, tasteful silver hoop in his left earlobe. The subtitle reads Mike Larsen. "We were driving from Minneapolis to San Francisco for my cousin Jackie's wedding," Mike says. His voice is deep, strong, and has the ring of youthful certainty and determination. "It was a big deal. She was marrying the son of one of the guys who runs one of the major movie studios, and there were going to be movie stars there and everything, so like third cousins were coming in from all over the country. My dad and my sister had gone out there two days before to help set things up, and because my sister had always been tight with the West Coast branch of the family." As he speaks, Mike's face is replaced on the screen by a pair of photographs. One is of a handsome, 40ish man with dark hair and blue eyes wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt and a red tie, smiling as he stands in a group of people in a slightly shabby office ; the photograph is labeled Bob Larsen. The second photograph is of a lovely, slim young lady with unruly blonde hair and a huge smile, and she wears a high school cheerleader's outfit; the photo is labeled Olivia Larsen. "We'd have flown out with them, but there was this party I wanted to go to -- my best friend Nick's brother Jay was going off to join the Marines, and he's a good guy so I wanted to say goodbye to him." The photographs are replaced by a film of Emily dancing on a stage. She is tall, lithe, and trim, and her legs are long and powerful. She is wearing a dancer's leotard beneath a fringed dress, the fringes whirling along with her hair as she twists and leaps with superb grace and skill. Her voice is heard saying, "I needed to go out later so that I could be at the final performance of a show I was in. I was an assistant professor of dance at the University of Minnesota, but that doesn't pay a lot. Bob made a steady salary as a social worker for Hennepin County, but the pay there was even worse. With Mike heading off to college and Olivia still in high school, we needed every penny we could get. So I did shows with a local company, gave private dance lessons, whatever I could do to pay the bills." Mike's smiles at the camera. "It wasn't like I was looking forward to spending three days in a car with my mom. I mean, we got along OK and everything, but not a lot of 18-year-old guys want to be stuck in a minivan with their moms visiting her friends and aunts you never heard of before. But that was what worked out for the schedule." Mike's face is replaced by a photograph of a white 1999 Chevrolet minivan sitting in a driveway in front of an open garage on a sunny summer day. Emily stands next to the vehicle wearing shorts that show off her legs and a baggy old Minnesota Twins tee shirt; she is laughing as she runs a soapy sponge along the hood. "Mom drove this old Chevy Lumina," Mike says in an amused-sounding voice-over. "And she loved that thing. Olivia and I used to joke she loved it more than she loved her kids. She never let anybody else drive it, not even dad. She babied it, she even named it -- 'Lou,' short for Lumina, right? She'd have actual conversations with it and everything. We used to tease her about it all the time, but it was her thing." "I did love Lou," Emily admits with a smile as her face returns to the screen. "He was a faithful old guy. He was the first new vehicle I ever had and I treated him right. He was reliable and I loved driving him." Her smile falters as she adds, "But the GPS didn't work." "Olivia broke the GPS," Mike explains as we see him again. "She was in the passenger seat, on the phone with her boyfriend, waving her arms around, and she hit it. Knocked it off the dashboard, busted it. Dad said we didn't have money to get it replaced then." "I didn't think we'd need it," Emily explains seriously. "Most of our trip was going to be on freeways. It didn't seem like a big issue at the time." Emily's face is replaced by a map of the northern Plains states as a red line begins to trace from Minneapolis, first south along I-35 and then west along I-90. "We left early on the morning of the 16th," her voice continues. The line terminates in Rapid City, South Dakota, at the edge of the Black Hills National Forest, and then the map disappears and is replaced by a picture of Emily sitting at a kitchen table with an elderly woman, both smiling brightly. "The first thing I wanted to do was visit my Aunt Penny. She's a wonderful person and Mike had never met her, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity. She was...I think 82 then, but she made a lavish dinner for us and we spent the night there. She didn't want to let us leave the next day, she just wanted us to stay and keep visiting." "We left early again on the 17th," Mike picks up as the screen shows a succession of photographs: the Black Hills, dark and brooding; Mike and Emily standing shoulder to shoulder in front of Mt. Rushmore, smiling at the camera; a scattering of tombstones on a barren hillside. "We saw Mt. Rushmore, which was okay, but I loved the Custer Battlefield. It was a really hot day and there wasn't a breath of wind. The air was just hanging there heavy, like a blanket. I remember standing on the top of that hill and looking down into the valley, past the tombstones to where the Sioux had their camp back then. The heat was making everything shimmer. It felt like I could almost hear the screams and the shots, like the place was haunted." The map resumes as the red line picks up again, traveling south and then west from the Black Hills on State 18, then west on State 20 until it hits I-25, which it follows to Casper, Wyoming. At Casper it strikes out on a series of state and county highways at it heads south and west: 220, 287, 28, and then finally northwest on 191 toward Pinedale before finally turning off into ranchland. "Our next stop was my friend Corinne's house," Emily says, "and we got completely lost. That should have been a warning, but we finally found her place. I assumed we could retrace our steps." Now there appears a photo of a large ranch house with impressive mountains in the background, and then another of Emily smiling as she stands next to a shorter, slightly plump woman about her age. "I went to college with Corinne," Emily explains. "We were both going to be dancers, and then we both got pregnant. I went back to school after the babies, but she married a rancher in Wyoming. They have a huge spread and I don't even know how many cattle. I hadn't seen her face-to-face since her wedding, so of course I enjoyed sitting down with her again, meeting her kids, having her meet Mike. It was good." Against a black screen, we see another title card: June 18th Emily reappears. Looking pensive, she opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, takes a deep breath, starts and stops again, and says, "It was my fault. I'd gotten lost on the way to Corinne's house so I'd had her write out very explicit directions back to the highway. It was almost a page long, handwritten, extremely detailed...and then I forgot it and left it sitting on the kitchen table. It was my fault." Mike's face replaces his mother's. He is looking off to the side, his expression a mixture of emotions in which regret and irritation feature prominently. He doesn't look at the camera as he speaks. "It's my fault. I saw the instructions on the table when we were leaving. I thought mom was just being nervous when she asked for it. I thought we could find our way back to the road with no problem." The screen is taken up by a montage of rolling Wyoming scrubland, hill after nearly- identical hill of low brush interspersed with stunted trees. The footage is slightly grainy and much of it is taken from a vehicle, with the overall impact being that the land in the area is dreary, intimidating, and very confusing in its relentless sameness. "I got lost," Emily says in voiceover. "And it wasn't just that I couldn't find the road. When I realized I couldn't find the road, I looked for the directions and realized I'd left them at Corinne's." Her face appears again with a rueful expression. "So we tried our phones. And, of course, there was no signal. We were miles away from anywhere, so there were no wireless towers. And, as I mentioned, the GPS was out, which would have saved us has it been working. I was irritated, but I didn't think we were in trouble." Cut to Mike, who explains, "And, like, three hours later, we're still driving. Like, in circles. It was weird, because we kept seeing the same damned rock fence" -- and here we see a grainy film of a crow sitting upon a dry-stone wall along the side of a dusty dirt road, surrounded by scrubby hills, with the Rockies looming ultramarine in the distance -- "and we kept saying, 'OK, now we've seen this before," and then half an hour later we've somehow looped around and we were seeing it again. It was kind of funny. I mean, you can't get mad about that kind of stuff, can you?" "When the accident happened," Emily says, "we were driving along side of a little stream, just a trickle of water coming down from the hills. There were thick trees and undergrowth between the stream and the road. I didn't even know the deer was there until it was jumping right into the front of my minivan." We see a slideshow of the Larsen minivan after the accident. The front passenger side is dented, the windshield is a spiderwebbed mess of broken, bloody glass, and the front axle has been ripped off as the van rolled over a rock. "It committed suicide," Emily explains calmly in voiceover. "It purposefully threw itself into a moving vehicle. It was a stupid, stupid animal." Pictures of the wreck are replaced by a brief clip of a pronghorn antelope looking stupid. "We didn't even have time to realize what it was," Mike explains. "There was a tenth of a second of movement flashing in and then there was this crunching thud as we hit the thing. It flipped up off the front end -- I remember seeing it almost upside down with those spindly legs up in the air -- and then we hit it again with the windshield, and the whole thing just shattered." "I lost control of the vehicle," Emily says in voiceover as we again see a closeup of the wrecked front axle, "and lurched off the road. I think I was going about 30. I couldn't have been going faster on that road." Mike is looking amused. "We felt the axle rip off, right? And we came to this sudden stop, and the airbags didn't even go off. And then mom starts swearing. I mean, she never swears, but all of a sudden she's saying words I didn't even know she knew, this string of absolute filth just gushing out of her mouth for like three straight minutes." Cut to Emily, looking as innocent as a lamb, saying, simply, "I didn't swear. I don't swear in normal conversation." Back to Mike, "So she's just ripping it. 'Motherfucking deer cocksucker piece of fucking idiot shit deer!' and on and on until it became just a string of swear words that didn't even make any sense. And I start laughing, because I'd never, ever heard her swear. Once I saw her hit her thumb with a hammer so hard she split the nail, and she was all, 'Oh gosh darn it.' But wreck her favorite minivan and she'll swear like a sailor." Cut briefly to a silent Emily, so prim that butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. "So," Mike continues, "we started walking." "We had to walk," Emily says. "We had no idea where we were or how to get to the road, and we hadn't seen another soul since we left Corinne's. For all we knew we could sit there a week and nobody would come by, and we weren't getting any cell signal. We had no choice." There is a grainy clip of a long, lonely road leading into the rolling, scrubby hills. "It was hot," Mike says in voiceover. "It was like 90 by that point and getting hotter, not even a breeze. There were no clouds. We had a little water but no food because we'd expected to be eating our lunch in some roadside diner, not trudging through the middle of nowhere. So it was pretty wack." Cut to Emily, looking troubled. "I think we'd been walking for about 30 minutes when I looked over my shoulder and saw the dust cloud rising from the hill we'd just come over. I pointed it out to Mike, and I think we both had a surge of excitement and hope. It didn't last." "It was way too big a cloud to be raised by one vehicle, like a pickup," Mike says. "And it didn't take 30 seconds before we were hearing the motorcycle sounds." "Corinne had told us there were outlaw biker gangs in the hills," says Emily. "We...didn't think we'd meet one of them." "My first reaction was to, like, hide or something," Mike says, looking pensive. "But there was literally no place we could hide. There's nothing on those hills but foot-high scrub. We were going to stand out no matter what we did." "I thought hiding might make it worse," says Emily. Her face is a carefully-composed mask that shows no emotion whatsoever. "I've always heard that if one meets a bear in the woods, one isn't to turn and run. Running triggers the bear's predator instinct and it begins the chase. Instead, the way to escape a bear is to show no fear and to slowly back away. I thought that was the best policy." "And that," Mike says matter-of-factly, "is how we met the Visigoths." Cut to a middle-aged man with an olive complexion, strong features, receding dark hair, and a mustache. He is neither handsome nor ugly, but rather has the sort of face that one might reasonably expect to forget almost immediately. He is wearing a medium-gray suit over a light blue shirt and a dark tie. His subtitle reads Milo Hernandez, Senior Special Agent, FBI Field Office -- Denver. "The Visigoths Motorcycle Club is a one-percenter biker gang operating in the central mountain region of the western United States," he says in a clipped, professional tone. "They focus on meth production and distribution and prostitution, for the most part. They're one of the smaller outfits out there, but they're very aggressive in defending their territory." As he's speaking, the screen shows a shot of the Visigoth logo -- a menacing human skull with red eyes, wearing a steel helmet with a nasal piece above the words "Visigoths MC" written in Gothic lettering. "They're smarter than a lot of their peers because they don't make trouble where they're based. In fact, they often have arrangements with city and county law enforcement that involve the law enforcement laying off of them in return for the Visigoths not committing crimes against citizens of that jurisdiction. Local sheriffs find it easier to ignore them, take a bribe, and let someone else deal with the problems they cause." The image is replaced onscreen by shaky phone-cam video of a brutal brawl between what appears to be rival motorcycle gangs; the footage gets granier as it zooms in on the Visigoths threads of some of the fighters as they wield baseball bats with tremendous effectiveness, and as two hold a rival biker while a third beats him remorselessly with a length of chain. Hernandez says, "Two years before the Larsens' encounter with them, this chapter of the Visigoths was involved in an attack on a bar in Cheyenne, Wyoming run by another gang that was trying to edge in on their meth distribution racket. This attack led to over a dozen hospitalizations, including one where the victim was in a coma for over three months, and the burning of the bar." Next we see home-movie footage of an American Indian man playing tag football in a backyard, and then a still photograph of that man smiling as he's surrounded by friends. Hernandez continues, "Six months after that event, they were implicated in the disappearance of Andrew White Feather, a businessman from Colorado Springs who apparently was planning to go to the police with information about the club. No body was ever found and no charges were ever brought because evidence was lacking, but police never had any other suspects." We were alarmed," Emily says as we see her again. "They were dressed...well, like outlaw bikers, obviously. Those sorts of people dress to frighten people like us, and they succeeded." "We stepped off the road as they came up," says Mike, "like maybe they could pass us by if they wanted to. But they didn't. Of course. The came up us and sort of circled around us, close in but staying on their bikes. Mom was squeezing my hand so hard it hurt." "I was terrified," Emily says simply. "We both were. I'm not ashamed of it. Anyone sensible would be frightened in that situation." We see the mugshot of a white man who could have been an extremely weathered 35 or a rather-weathered 50. He sports a full beard and a long mane of light-brown hair; tattoos are visible on both sides of his neck. He stares at the booking camera with insolent contempt, and the look in his eyes is unsettlingly predatory. "The leader of this chapter at the time was Douglas Hounslow," Agent Hernandez says in voice-over, "better known as Petey to his friends. He'd spent time in prison in four different states as well as the Federal Penitentiary system for crimes ranging from solicitation and drug offenses all the way up to assault with a deadly weapon. He was implicated and held in two murders, but never charged," and here the screen shows two side-by-side photographs, one of a lovely young woman with the subtitle Victoria Reese and the other of a man in biker leathers with the label Edwin Fewkes. We see Hernandez again as he says, "Witnesses disappeared or changed their stories, evidence came up missing, that sort of thing. He was a very resourceful and violent man." Folie a Deux, Episode 01 "The leader said his name was Petey," Emily says as she reappears, "and at first he actually seemed nice. Frightening still, of course, because of his appearance, but he spoke politely and calmly. He asked us if the wrecked minivan was ours, and of course we had to admit it was. He asked us what we were doing out there." "I told them that we were visiting someone there and got lost on the way back to their house," Mike says. "I wanted them to think there was someone waiting for us who'd call the cops if we didn't show up. I'm pretty sure they didn't buy it." "I don't think they believed Mike's story," Emily confirms. "But aside from looking like they looked and being a little too close to us, they weren't threatening. If anything, at that point they seemed to be going out of their way to disprove stereotypes about bikers by being pleasant and polite. We talked a bit and it ended with Petey offering to take us to the nearest service station. We accepted the offer." "I think mom believed him," Mike says with a sour expression. "I didn't, not from the start, but we were stuck. I didn't think we were being offered a choice though, no matter how polite they phrased it, so I got on the bike too." "I don't know if I believed them or not," Emily muses. "I wanted to. It's very...seductive, when you're frightened, to be offered an explanation of the situation that makes you less scared. I took that explanation at face value because the alternative was more frightening. And besides, when the media depicts socially-marginalized groups, the coverage tends to be sensational and inaccurate, so I thought that perhaps bikers had simply gotten a bad reputation they didn't deserve. So we got on and we went for a ride. It was a short ride, I think less than 15 minutes, and we were there." Her face is replaced by shaky, hand-held camera footage of a large three-story building with peeling white paint and a sagging roof. In the background mountains loom in the distance, while in the foreground is an assemblage of vehicles of various sorts, from motorcycles to cars to vans, some in partial disrepair. Then there is a shot of a large firepit with a motorized spit capable of taking an entire cow, surrounded by benches and picnic tables. Another shot shows a long shed that perhaps had once been a stable but now contains two rows of close-parked motorcycles, a workbench, and tools on the walls. At this point the screen is taken up by what looks like cell-phone footage of a drunken nighttime revel, lit mainly by a blaze in the firepit: bikers in their jackets stand and sit with beer, liquor, and marijuana, while several tattooed, scantily-clad women sit in their laps or dance in a manner suggesting that they're strippers, and one is even off to the side performing fellatio on a heavily-muscled and tattooed biker in a wifebeater. We hear Agent Hernandez again, saying, "The local chapter was headquartered out of a complex that had been built as a hunting lodge back around the turn of the 20th century. During Prohibition it had been turned into an illegal resort casino, and since that time it has served variously as a brothel, a drug treatment center, and a commune. The Visigoths had been there about seven years by that point and were using the complex as a combination clubhouse, dormitory, garage, warehouse for contraband, and meth lab." Emily again, saying, "It looked run-down. It looked unpleasant. Frankly the whole place smelled bad, and even the whole pig they had roasting on the spit didn't disguise the stench. There were women there whom I didn't want my son to see, and they were dressed very...well, one of them was topless. It was a place I wanted us to be away from as soon as we could be." Mike is shown again, looking thoughtful. "You want to know what I thought when I saw the place? It looked like the kind of place you see in movies where innocent people get chopped to bits and fed to pigs. It was really bad. There was this really strong smell of cat piss in the air. This place was obviously a meth lab, among other things. And everybody -- everybody -- was looking at us like we were meat. Most of them were sort of grinning at us, like there was a big joke that we weren't in on. Because we were the joke." Cut to Emily. "Now that we had arrived at their hideout, it did feel as though a mask was dropped and we were being allowed to see the true face of things. It's difficult to explain, because we weren't being threatened or even spoken to directly, but time and again we saw bikers or their women whispering in little knots, looking at us, and then giving us unpleasant smiles." "It was pretty obvious after a couple minutes that they had something cooked up for us," Mike confirms. "It was like we were flies who came pounding on a spider's door demanding to be let in, like they couldn't quite believe we'd come with them and they were trying to decide how bad they were going to fuck us up. Like I said, it wasn't what anybody said or was even doing, it was just this vibe, this really nasty vibe in the air. It's like when you're a little kid and bigger kids are around you, mean kids -- you don't need them to make threats to feel threatened. You know they're going to do something to you and they're just enjoying letting you twist in the wind before they do it. There was no doubt." "We...were aware of our situation," Emily says. "Acutely so. I liken the feeling to being cornered by a vicious dog, where the dog isn't necessarily actively threatening you at the moment, but you know you're only a twitch away from being mauled. The danger is something you sense on an instinctual level. Mike and I were standing together, trying to avoid eye contact with absolutely everyone else, when a...woman approached us." The screen now shows a stage at a strip club where a bottle-blonde struts. She is impressively leggy and not unskilled as she swings up on the pole, but the comparison between her relatively crude moves and the almost preternatural grace Emily showed in her clip is unavoidable. She wears a cropped white tank-top over rock-hard fake breasts, a dark blue G-string, and spiked heels, and her ensemble reveals an extensive collection of tattoos, mostly stars but mingled with paw prints, kanji characters, and several unreadable words in frilly script. The subtitle reads Janna "Swan" Dundee. "She was obviously a stripper," Emily continues in voiceover, the distaste evident in her voice. "She was wearing a tee shirt with no bra, and her nipples were plainly visible through the fabric. She pressed herself up against my son like he wasn't standing right next to his mother." Mike looks amused. "This chick comes rubbing up on me. Not even remotely my type, even if I wasn't terrified at that moment. But she actually makes eye contact with mom as she starts whispering this absolute filth in my ear, which really pissed mom off." "I shoved her," Emily says proudly. "I'm not a violent woman, but I was already frightened and when I saw that...tart rubbing herself against my son like a cat in heat, I snapped. It was the maternal protective instinct taking over." "The chick stumbled back maybe three steps and then came right back at mom, like BAM, total catfight mode, screaming how she was going to fuck mom up," Mike says. "So I put my arm out and this chick hits it like almost neck level, right? Almost like I clotheslined her, which I didn't mean to do. All I wanted to do was stop her, but then she's pissed at me and coming at me with fingernails out, like she's gonna take out my eye or something. And that's when I noticed things had gotten really, really quiet." "Everyone was looking at us," says Emily. "Everyone. There was no conversation, no movement except for the tart who was unleashing profanities at us and trying to attack my son. She scratched him on the arm before Petey stepped in." "The leader grabbed the chick by the arm and yanked her back and just stared into her eyes," Mike relates. "He didn't have to say a thing, he just stared and she got as meek as a mouse. After maybe ten seconds of her (and me) being really uncomfortable, he lets her go and she wanders off rubbing the place on her arm where he'd grabbed her. Then he looked at mom the same way." "I knew...I knew I'd done something foolish," Emily says, actually looking shaken at the recollection, "and I admit my blood ran cold. I could see in his eyes that he was a man who'd stop at nothing. Mike put his arm around my shoulders and puffed out his chest, but...no. I knew I couldn't have Mike making a show of defiance then. My son was a strong young man and someone he cared for was in danger, and strong young men do stupid things in times like that; they can't help it, it's in their natures. It was my...impetuosity that brought it to a head, and I couldn't have my son being hurt because of me." "Mom blames herself for how it went down," Mike says, shaking his head. "But if she hadn't pushed that chick, it would have been something else. The chick would have kept on doing more and more and then some biker would have come over and gotten pissed I was messing with his woman, or else I'd have given somebody a funny expression that made them come after us. What happened with her pushing the girl wasn't a cause, it was a pretext. Something was going to go down from the moment the Visigoths topped that hill and saw us by the side of the road." "Petey just stared at me," Emily says. "It seemed like hours, but I'm sure it was no more than a few seconds. Then turned to Mike and asked --" "'Champ, think you can hold your shit together for ten minutes while your mom and I have a talk?'" Mike says, affecting a growly voice. "What could I say? Like I could tell him no?" "He took me by the arm and led me away from my son," Emily says levelly. "Walking away from my son at that time, being taken by that terrible man into that building, was the most difficult thing I've ever had to do." From offscreen we hear a female voice asking, "Even harder than what came after?" Emily nods decisively. "Yes, harder than anything that came after. A part of me wondered if I would come back out of that building alive, but that wasn't what worried me most. A much bigger part of me wondered whether, if I did come back, I would find my son alive and unharmed. There was a feeling in the air as though...a trap had been triggered, perhaps? Or rather, that a horn had been blown and now the hounds were going to tear the fox to bits. That was what was terrifying, knowing that I was abandoning him to those bandits and that I could do nothing to protect him." "Rape?" Mike says. "A beating? Murder? All of the above? I watched her go and I thought all those things were possible. And I couldn't do a goddamned thing about it. Not a fucking thing." "He took me into the foyer," Emily says. "Rather, what had been the foyer at some time. Now it was a living room of sorts, with a large television and some dreadfully tatty furniture. He had me sit on the sofa and sat next to me but not uncomfortably close. He offered me a drink, which I declined, but he insisted. I think it was Jack Daniels, and he made me drink a fairly large tot of it. And then he started telling me a story." Her voice quavers just a bit as she says this, but she quickly recovers. "He told me about a Native American man from Colorado Springs -- he called him a 'redskin' -- who had been in business with them." Again we see a picture of Andrew White Feather. "Apparently this man had gotten into trouble with the police and decided to give evidence against the Visigoths. In retaliation, the Visigoths kidnapped him and brought him here. They tortured him for two days -- Petey said that they flayed him alive at the end, and when he died they cut his body into small pieces a few inches on a side and scattered the pieces in the mountains so that animals could eat them." Emily is shown, looking unsettled. "His objective was to terrify me. He succeeded. And then he told me that my son and I had abused the hospitality of the club by attacking one of their, and I use his word, 'bitches,' when said bitch was just trying to be welcoming." We then see a different picture of "Petey" Hounslow, and as Emily continues to speak we slowly zoom in on his eyes to find an absolute lack of empathy, kindness, or any human virtue; his is the gaze of a predatory beast. We hear Emily in voiceover saying, "He drew a knife from his boot. It was the biggest knife I've ever see. The blade was at least 15 inches long and serrated along part of its back -- I think it's what's called a Bowie knife. The tip was as sharp as a needle, which I know because he suddenly put a hand around my throat and held the tip up to my eye. He told me that he'd be justified in taking my eye then and there as 'retribution.' He used that word several times, 'retribution,' as though trying to keep some disease-ridden prostitute off my underage son was some sort of crime. But I couldn't argue." Emily looks agitated and distressed as we see her again. "He went on to explain that he didn't want to kill me or Mike, but he needed to make a show of punishing me. Honestly, I was too terrified to understand very much of what he was saying, even when he began talking about alternatives, such as letting his men have their way with me -- all forty-something of them -- or having Mike 'catch a beating.' I was...frantic, panicking, babbling, pleading. I realize now that this reaction was exactly what he wanted. He wanted my fear, my desperation, and I gave it to him. I couldn't hold it back." She sighs deeply, and adds, "And then he told me what Mike and I had to do in order to get out of there alive." "I was still outside," Mike says. "I was just waiting there for...something. I didn't know what was happening to my mom. I didn't know what would happen to me either, but I didn't care about that, not then. And no, it's not like I was brave or heroic or any of that shit. My mom was in trouble, and that's all that mattered. I wasn't even thinking about myself. "Anyway," he continues, "my arm was starting to sting. That stripper chick had clawed me like six times up and down my arms and now that I didn't have anything to do except sit and worry, I was feeling it. And I was surrounded by a bunch of a-holes who were just looking for an excuse to fuck me up. And maybe two minutes after my mom goes in, all of a sudden there was a guy right next to me. He was a huge dude, like six-six, two-fifty, the kind of guy whose muscles have muscles. He was carrying a bottle of Jack and he told me to take a drink, said it would settle me down. I'm not a drinker, and especially not then -- I just never liked it much. But I wasn't going to tell this guy to go take a leap, you know? So I took a drink -- a few drinks, until he told me to stop. I don't know, maybe as much as you'd get in three or four shots. Then he claps me on the shoulder like we're best buddies and walks off. "I don't know how long I was waiting. How long she was in there, I mean. It was a while, maybe ten minutes? Then she came out, and I was like, 'Great, she's not hurt!' And then I saw the look on her face, and..." Mike pauses, obviously searching for a word. "Shattered. Like when you throw a glass against a wall. That's how her face looked. Not physically, she wasn't even touched. But emotionally...yeah, shattered. That's when I knew it was bad." "I honestly don't know how I walked out of there," Emily says. "My head was swimming. I felt like my stomach was actually trying to get out of my mouth. It wasn't nerves of 'butterflies,' it actually felt like my stomach was physically trying to remove itself from my body. I was sick. I was so sick at the thought. But it needed to be me to tell him, not that vicious thug. I did win that...concession...from Petey. Mike met me halfway and hugged me. Just that...hug, that huge hug." Her voice catches in her throat and she wipes a tear from her cheek. "Sorry. I just remember that hug, the purity of it, the absolute and unconditional love I felt, and I remember the ache, the sorrow inside me at knowing it would never happen again between us. Not that kind of hug." Mike licks his lips nervously. "I asked her what was wrong, and she said, 'Mikey, we need to talk.' Now, she only ever calls me 'Mikey' when something is fucking awful, so I knew we were in for it. My stomach just...bam, right through the ground. But I held her as close as I could, you know? That was all I could do." Emily looks distraught, though she's struggling to keep a strong front. "I told him that Petey had given us a choice of four ways we could leave there. The first was that I could...as Petey described it, 'pull a train' of every man there, two or three times, however many times they wanted me and in whatever way. I couldn't even get that out of my mouth before Mike said no." "I didn't say no," Mike corrects. "I shouted it. The leader had come out of the building by then and I almost went after him then and there for even suggesting that -- it was only the fact that mom was holding me back that kept me from it. The leader just smirked, the fucker." "I tried to convince him," Emily says, "but of course he wouldn't hear of it. He pointed out that there were perhaps 40 men there, all of them rough and vicious, and even if only half of them wanted to go a second time, there was physically no way I could survive 60 rapes, one after another. And he was right, of course, but that was the solution I wanted to take. I tried to convince him." "She was seriously set on it," Mike sighs. "But there was no way. No way I was going to let that happen if I had to die to try and stop it. Mom wanted to pick that one so that they'd leave me alone, but they'd have had to kill me. No way. No way." "I told him the second option was for him to, as Petey said, 'catch a beating.'" Emily's voice hardens. "He asked what that meant, and I told him that the bikers would all take it in turn to beat him, kick him, punch him. Perhaps to death. He didn't hesitate in telling me he would." "If it meant they'd let her go unharmed?" Mike asks. "Yeah, of course I would. I'd have done it in a heartbeat then. I'd do it in a heartbeat now. She told me no." "I couldn't stand by and watch my son be beaten to death," Emily says plaintively. "It would kill me. I'd die. I genuinely don't know how I could possibly survive that. I wouldn't let him. I told him the third option." Mike is looking off to the side for a moment. "The third choice. Yeah. She told me that what the leader wanted was a show. A sex show. Between me and her, right there, right then." He looks back at the camera. "He wanted us to fuck. He wanted me and my mother to fuck, for her to be vocal in her pleasure, for us to convince them that we really did love it. If we did that, he said they'd let us go." "There was one more thing," Emily says, looking rather forlornly into the camera. "He had to ejaculate inside me. More than that, I had to beg him to ejaculate inside me. My own son." "I asked what the fourth way out was," Mike says, "and she said that was if they just killed us both, cut us up, and scattered us in the mountains. So it wasn't much of a choice. One way I wouldn't let her take, one way she wouldn't let me take, and one way we couldn't take. That only left one thing." Emily again, her head cocked at a thoughtful angle, eyes on the floor. "It didn't seem real, and at the same time it was the most completely immediate moment of my entire life." She looks up at the camera and there is something strange in her eyes, the look of someone who has seen and done things that are incomprehensible to the audience. "Of course it was unreal, because I was about to have sex with my teenage son in front of an audience of savages. How could that possibly be real? At the same time, though, the presence of danger -- extreme danger, of the worst sort -- heightened everything." Folie a Deux, Episode 01 From offscreen, a female voice asks, "What sort of things?" "My senses," Emily says. "Everything seemed astonishingly vivid. The colors were sharper than I'd ever noticed them before or since. The smells, the cat urine and the roasting pork, the gasoline and the wood smoke from the fire, engine grease, unwashed bikers -- all of that burned itself into my memory. I can smell it all still in my mind, as though I was still there. My hearing, though...I suppose that's the exception. I know there was talking around us, an excited buzz from our intended audience, laughing, swearing, but I don't think any of it registered. I could only really hear my son's voice and my own." "I can't tell you how I felt," Mike says with a shrug. "It's too complicated, too mixed up. I was angry a lot more than I was scared, and I wasn't scared of the bikers anymore. I was scared of actually doing it. The actual sex. Not being watched, not even being forced to do it. I was scared of doing it with my mom. I didn't want to hurt her. I didn't want to...mess her up. I mean, I knew it was going to mess both of us up, but I wanted to protect her. And...I...didn't want to disappoint her. It's stupid to think about it at a time like that, but it was going to be traumatic enough her that I didn't want bad sex to be piled on top of it. But then that's fucked up because it's like, I want to be a good fuck FOR MY MOM. And so I immediately started thinking I was a pervert for even thinking that, like, putting a qualitative thing on what we had to do. Like, shouldn't it have been something I just put my head down and got through? Was it fucked up that I wanted to make it good for her? Should she know her son is a good fuck? Should I know what it takes to be a good fuck for her? So there's all these crazy questions just crashing through my mind. I told you it was complicated." "Did you have a girlfriend at the time?" the interviewer asks. "No," Mike says. "But there was a girl I liked a lot." Another picture appears: a petite redhead with freckles, sparkling green eyes, and an enormous smile. Her name is given as Hannah Williamson. Mike relates in voiceover, "Hannah. We'd never really done anything, but we were really attracted to each other. She was this awesome, amazing girl, super smart, funny, sweet, hot. Everything, the whole deal. We'd been kinda dancing with each other for a long time, like this mutual attraction that never worked out. She was free when I was going out with somebody, and when I was free she was dating somebody else. She broke up with her boyfriend at the end of senior year and she and I had talked a few times since then. I was planning to ask her out as soon as I got back from the wedding." "I knew Mike wasn't a virgin," Emily says with a shrug. "I suppose that mostly I tried not to think too much about it." The offscreen woman asks, "When you realized that there was no choice, that you two would have to have sex, did you want it to be good for him? Right in the first moment you realized, I mean." Emily considers this for a few seconds, then says, "No. Honestly it wasn't a thought that I was capable of formulating in that moment. I didn't want to hurt him. I didn't want to scar him emotionally any more than was absolutely necessary. But right then, right when we decided that we had to do it, no, it didn't occur to me to want to be good for him." The offscreen interviewer again: "What was that moment like for you?" "Horrific," Emily says without hesitation. "Mike is my son, and I was about to have sex with him. I was about to share something with him that parents are never supposed to share with their children. Society and nature have always said that. It sickened me that we were being forced to transgress perhaps the single most fundamental law in human relations." "Everybody started forming this big circle around us," Mike says. "It was like it was a clown show or something for them. They were laughing and smiling and shouting stuff. Like, 'Show your mamma how much you love her' and 'Make a man outta that boy,' stuff like that. Like it was a game. And there we were, we had to fuck right there in the dirt, me and my mom. I didn't even know how to start, so I told her I loved her." "Mike put his lips against my ear and whispered," Emily says, her voice tightening with emotion. "I'll always remember his exact words. He said, 'Mom, I love you. I'll always love you. Nothing that happens here today will change that. Nothing these people could do can touch that. Just hold onto that and we'll be fine." "How did that make you feel?" the interviewer asks. "Proud!" Emily says emphatically. "It was so mature, so strong. I think he was stronger in that moment than I was, and I felt like I was going to explode with pride that he had become such a...a powerful young man. He wasn't a boy anymore, he was a man, and I just felt myself swell with love for him. It's strange, certainly, but those words, and the complete confidence with which he said them, actually made me feel safe." "I made the first move," says Mike. "There was no way I was going for boobs or between her legs right off, that would have been way too much for me, and for her too. I had my lips right there, so I nibbled her ear. I took her earlobe between my lip sand just suckled on it, sort of teased it with my tongue. And instantly I felt her pull in this deep breath, this sort of gasp." "My ears are my most sensitive spot," Emily says, pulling back her hair to reveal her left ear, decorated by a tasteful silver stud. "At least, my most sensitive spot not usually covered by clothing. He didn't know that about me, of course. How could he? But he went right there and...and his lips were so clever, so certain, so direct. I was shocked by it, shocked by the act, shocked by how right the move was on his part...shocked at how good he was at it. Right from the very first, he was...exquisite." "Where were your hands?" the interviewer asks. "One was on his shoulder, just resting there, and the other was on his hip, just above his waistline. I was very stiff. If he hadn't made the first move, I don't know if I could have. But he took the initiative...the...command. I needed that." "I was surprised by her reaction," Mike says with a trace of a cocky smile. "It was the first time I'd touched her sexually, and it wasn't even really that sexual, but she loved it." "How did that make you feel?" the offscreen interviewer asks. His smile gets a little bigger as he said, "Good. I wanted it to be good for her. I wanted her to be able to...lose herself in it. It was like, if she could shut out all these other people, if we could do that, I mean -- if it was just us, just her and me doing this, then it would be as bad for either of us." "The way his arms were around me, I could really feel his strength," Emily says. Something in her voice suggests that this is not an unpleasant memory. "He was an athlete and very, very fitness-conscious. Bob was too, of course, but there's a difference between the body of a high-school athlete and a 38-year-old man with a desk job who runs and goes to the gym. I couldn't deny it was a pleasant difference. Mike's arms were strong and absolutely certain. He had one hand on my lower back, above my waist, and it was very chaste and proper but I could feel it there, so big, so steady. I think I felt his hand even more than I did the lips on my ear because it made me feel so supported. His other arm was around my upper back, holding me up, hold me to him. And his lips on me..." She finishes with a small, slightly awkward and ashamed smile. "She tilted her head," Mike says. "Just a little, but it made her hair drop out of the way so I could kiss her ear better. It was obvious she liked it, so I kept doing it to relax her...maybe start her thinking that it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world." "I don't think I was getting turned on yet," Emily muses, "but it did feel very good. It wasn't erotic (at least not yet) but it was very sensual and soft and intimate. The intimacy was the thing I needed most in that situation. I just closed my eyes and let it happen." "I worked her earlobe for a little while, then I took my mouth off it," Mike says. "She tensed a little at first, but when she realized that I was just moving to the other ear she tilted her head and brushed her hair back to make it easier for me to get it. When I got my lips on it she made a kind of a happy sound, almost like a little purr, and then a gasp. And then she told me I was really good at that." "I told him that to encourage him," Emily says, "and because it was the truth. At that point I'd been married to his father for almost 15 years, and with him for over 19, and he still wasn't as good at that as Mike was from the first moment he put his lips on me. I wanted him to know he was doing it right." "I wasn't in a hurry," Mike tells us. "The assholes wanted a show, but I didn't give a fuck about them. This was about me and my mom, and she was liking this. So I went from left to right and back again. She sort of cuddled up against me, just pressed herself against me real close, and I tightened my arms around her. She liked that too, and by the time I was back on her left ear she'd taken her hand from my shoulder and was running her fingers through my hair." "It was strange, certainly, to be doing that with my son," Emily says. "Don't misunderstand that. It was painful and awkward and so incredibly sad that I can't put it into words. But that doesn't mean that my nerves stopped functioning. It doesn't mean that things that normally felt good somehow didn't feel good. And it doesn't matter how strong your soul is -- your body can still betray you." "When I first kissed her on the lips was probably the most awkward part of the whole thing, start to finish," says Mike. "It was sexual in a way the ear thing wasn't. It was my lips on hers, my tongue on hers. That was when we had to pull each other across the line." "To this day I'm grateful he kissed me," Emily says. "It's not just that he took the initiative, though I needed him to do that. But the kiss was so very intimate. When I felt his lips on mine and felt his tongue move across my lips, I found I could shut out all the awful things that were being said around me, the puerile lewdness those barbarians were shouting at us, and focus completely on him, and on me, and on that kiss. It was the perfect thing to do." "It was just lips at first," Mike tells us. "I pressed my lips against her lips and just held them there for a few seconds, before I began to move them, and in a moment she responded. She started kissing me back. I think she needed the reassurance that a kiss gave her, the reassurance that I loved her and always would. And then, after about a minute of kissing with closed mouths, I ran my tongue across the crease where her lips met. She made a little sound when she felt it, just this little gasp that I could barely hear. It was almost more of an exhalation. She stiffened a bit and let my tongue move...and then she parted her lips and let our tongues meet." "It was just the tips of our tongues at first," Emily recalls. "Just the very most nimble part of the end, touching tentatively and hesitantly. I recall my mind screaming at me that I was French kissing my son and it was wrong, but there was another part of me that realized it was still a kiss." "What do you mean?" asks the interviewer. "I mean that even though it was with my son, and I shouldn't have been doing it, it felt good to have my tongue against his, just as it would have with anyone else. Except...no, better than anyone else. Better than anyone else in the world. I was kissing Mike and it was all right because I loved him. I loved him more than any other man in the world." "More than your husband?" Emily shrugs and smiles, a simple and eloquent answer on its own. "My relationship with Bob was...interesting. Complex, certainly. We'll talk more about that later, but for now I will simply say that I never loved Bob nearly as much as I loved Mike. And when our tongues met and began to dance together, I realized that the love I felt for him was what was going to get me -- us -- through the ordeal." "But it wasn't that kind of love, was it?" the interviewer asks. "No," Emily admits, "but I discovered something then: that love, real love, is a very flexible thing. It becomes what it needs to be to survive, and to help you survive. We loved each other like mother and son, but in that moment we needed our love to carry us through, and it changed to be able to do that. When our tongues began to move together, I felt his love for me, and I knew he could feel my love as well." "There was this weird phase right at first," Mike says with a slightly shy grin. "This awkward part, where we were both super-aware of who we were tongue-kissing. It was uncomfortable for...less than a minute, I suppose, and then I just got into it." "I discovered that my son is an excellent kisser," Emily says, and the obvious embarrassment she feels is colored by pride and even excitement. "The oddness of it passed almost immediately, and once it was gone all I could feel was that it was a wonderful kiss that was getting better by the moment as we learned each other's motions. When he caressed my teeth with his tongue, I put the tip of my tongue against him and just felt him explore me. It was wrong, but it was also thrilling." "In what way?" the interviewer asks. "Because it had been almost 20 years since I'd kissed anyone but my husband," Emily replies. "And to be brutally honest, Bob was never a very good kisser. I'd forgotten how wonderful, how dizzying and breathtaking a simple kiss could be. And now, here I was with someone I loved as much as I could love, who was becoming a lover (although temporarily), and he was kissing me like I hadn't been kissed since before I'd met his father. No, I take that back -- I'd never felt that way while kissing, ever. My stomach was all in butterflies and I could feel myself relaxing all over and melting into him. It was the sort of kiss that could have seduced a stone, and I'm not made of stone. I had no chance before that kiss." "My mom was hungry," Mike says. "That's the word I'd use. Once the awkwardness wore off she had her mouth so tight to mine that my lips got bruised. Seriously. She kissed me back, absolutely, and she did more, like when she sucked my tongue. She put her lips around it and suckled it deep into her mouth and then moved her tongue and her lips up and down it like she was giving it a blowjob. It felt amazing." "Did that make you think of other things?" the interviewer inquires. "Of course it did!" Mike nodded vigorously, a mischievous smile on his handsome face. "It made me think what that tongue and those lips could do on my cock. I couldn't help it, any guy would have thought the same thing in my place. From the way she was working my tongue, I knew she could give a blowjob that would make steam shoot out of my ears." "That moment when I started to suck his tongue was the first time I felt his body...respond in an aroused fashion," Emily says delicately. "What do you mean?" the interviewer asks. "I felt his...penis...begin to harden against my stomach. Before then all I had felt was his muscles, and they were certainly hard, but now there was something else as well." "How did that make you feel?" Emily thinks seriously for a moment, then says, "It made me feel a very complex set of emotions, and I'm not positive that I can explain them. There was awkwardness first, because of the knowledge that I was arousing my own son and his erection was pressed between us. There was relief that I felt it begin to happen just from a kiss, because I had feared he might not be able to get aroused at all because of the fear and the unnaturalness of the situation, and that would undoubtedly have had very unpleasant consequences. Immediately after that reaction there came shame, for being glad I was giving my own son an erection, and indeed for giving him the erection in the first place. And then there was curiosity: I hadn't seen his penis since he was a little boy and I hadn't paid attention to it as he grew, and it was only natural that I wonder about it. How long it was, how thick, what it looked like, all of that was going through my head." "Were you getting wet?" the interviewer asks. Emily blushes, and it is apparent that she is genuinely uncomfortable with such frank and open discussions of sexuality. "Not yet, but I could feel myself relaxing to the point where I could become aroused. Again, I was surprised at that and relieved, because I hadn't thought I could with Mike -- which, of course, brought on the inevitable guilt that my son could arouse me in that way." "The kiss was just getting hotter and hotter," Mike says. "We weren't just 'kissing' anymore, we were making out. Like, the kiss was something we were both getting into, something we were both enjoying and wanting more of. I was getting a hard-on, and I was like, do I pull back? Getting a hard-on from your mom is fucked up, right? But then I was like, no, why would I pull back from it? I had to get hard, and I had to put it into her when I was hard. I was going to be fucking her in a few minutes, so why be coy about having an erection?" "Did she seem to enjoy it?" asks the interviewer. "No, not at first," he says. "She didn't respond to it at all. And once I knew I wanted her to feel it, I was like, I want you to respond! I didn't want to be the only one out there on the limb of being turned on in this situation. So I let my hand drift down and I squeezed her ass. And my mom's a dancer -- she has an awesome ass, just as hard as a rock, muscular, full. Her cheek filled my hand perfectly and I squeezed it, then moved my hand down a little more so my fingers were underneath the cheek toward her crotch, and I pulled her into me." Emily sighs in pleasant recollection. "When Mike touched my...bottom, and drew me in closer, I finally felt the first twinges of excitement. He's very strong, and he was very confident and certain in a way I hadn't expected him to be. It was a very possessive thing for him to do, and I enjoy being possessed during sex. In fact, I need to be possessed to enjoy it. I need to be dominated and controlled. I need to feel like the man is stronger and can overpower me, can make me do what he wants me to do, so that I'm free to be soft and feminine and yielding. I hadn't felt that with Bob in a very, very long time, so when Mike touched me in exactly that way and I could feel his strength and his assuredness and his command, my body simply reacted." "Her nipples got hard," Mike says with a grin. "I felt them just pop right up where she was pressed against me, and she moaned a little into my mouth. I think it was then that I realized she was gonna be vocal during sex, but I had no idea how vocal! But she sort of wiggled against me and I got harder immediately, and she kind of whimpered. It was this sound of...it wasn't like she was begging me to fuck her yet or anything, but it was such a sexy goddamned sound, like this amazed little sound. And I felt like she was getting more turned on than she expected to." "How did that make you feel?" Mike opens his mouth to speak, reconsiders, and finally says, "Strong. Powerful. Good. Proud, I guess, most of all. I knew how painful and weird and traumatic this was going to be for us, and I knew she knew it too, so that when she made that turned-on little sound into my mouth and wiggled in closer, I knew I could make this good for her. I knew that it could be good sex." "Mike has told me that I made a particular sound that excited him," Emily says, a twinkle in her eyes, "but of course I don't remember it. What I do remember instead is his...penis -- I have to get used to saying that. Penis. His penis. I felt his penis get bigger and harder and jump against me, against my stomach. I remember exactly how it felt against me in that moment, and the thrill I felt run through me when I realized that it was bigger than his father's."