The Serpent's Trap

The Serpent's Trap

Jag was being watched.

         For the second straight afternoon a blue Toyota Tercel sat outside of his townhouse for over an hour, its sole occupant pretending to read a newspaper. Jag could think of no explanation for its presence other than surveillance. He told Anna as much.

         "Go out there and tell him to fuck off," Anna said.

         "But if I accuse him of watching me," Jag argued, "he'll know I have something to hide."

         "Well, quit your bitching, then," Anna said.

         Business was strained that week. Jag became cryptic on the phone, saying things like "the cat has come home" when his customers made their inquiries. His distrustful behaviour seemed to rub off on them, the phone and doorbell ringing much less than usual.

         "The mortgage payment is due next week," Anna reminded him, ominously, that morning. Jag began to sweat whenever she mentioned the mortgage payment. It made him think of all his other obligations.

         Before he left for work, Jag took an inventory of his stock and finances. It had become a daily ritual. First he went to the fridge, where both vegetable crispers were full of marijuana portioned into one-ounce bags. He counted them and made an obscure note in an old bible. Next he opened the freezer. Behind the stacks of Anna's veggie burgers and his frozen steaks were four large freezer bags, each containing an additional half-pound of pot. He gave the bags a quick eyeball assessment and scratched another note in the Book of Psalms.

         "God, it smells like a skunk in here," Anna said. "When are you going to get rid of that stuff?" Anna preferred when he dealt in unsmelly commodities but Jag was confined by the laws of supply and demand, and everyone loved weed.

         In the bedroom he opened the bottom dresser drawer. From beneath Anna's innumerable socks and neglected lingerie, the stuff she only wore the first month they were together, he withdrew two large zipper bags containing many smaller bags of colourful pills. He compared his counts with the notes in the bible; everything checked out. He put the pills back. If he sold each one at full street value he would have over a hundred thousand dollars in profit. Of course it was impossible; he would have to move it in bulk to make his payments on time. But it was a nice thought.

         Finally he unscrewed the grill from the bathroom vent and removed the candy tin he had hidden there. He counted the cash one bill at a time. Fifty-six hundred dollars. Four thousand to his guys. Twelve hundred to the mortgage. The other four hundred plus any additional revenue was spending money for the next week. His heart fluttered with fear when he thought of what might happen if he didn't have that spending money. It was almost more daunting than not being able to pay his guys.

         His daily double-checks might have seemed obsessive but they were necessary, since everything sat in delicate balance and Jag could ill afford any losses. There was the mortgage on the townhouse, cell phone bills, cable TV, Internet, car payments, credit cards, lines of credit. It was exhausting just thinking about it all. But first and foremost were his two guys. It was a pretty little mess: Jag was double-dealing, using the revenue from one guy's stuff to pay the other guy, back and forth. It was nothing unusual, just the way the business went, and seemed an easy enough juggling act at first, but then he hit a snag with some late-paying customers and as a result one guy or the other was looking for money almost every day. It was a tiring business and Jag wished he could tell them to piss off but they didn't take well to such phrases, so he did what he could to keep them happy. Because after all, there was Anna to consider.

         It had started back in high school. He was new in town, having moved with his parents from a sleepy village at the outskirts of the city to a much larger suburb. In this new environment Jag felt utterly anonymous, a quiet boy without an identity. While he wasn't exactly shy, he found it virtually impossible to establish connections with kids his age. There seemed to be no common ground.

By the end of grade ten he found himself gravitating to the stoners, who were a less discriminating bunch than the jocks and skaters and even the nerds. They didn't seem to mind that he seldom initiated a conversation. Their clique, as it were, had no dress code and required no special skills or equipment. What it did require was being exposed to, and sometimes partaking of, drugs and alcohol. Jag had no particular interest in either. He became silly and flamboyant after a few beers and pot made him even more nervous than usual. He was only seeking acceptance, not an escape from reality. What captured his interest, however, was all the money changing hands. He was good enough with numbers to deduce that someone was making a tidy profit from this unassuming group of potheads.

Unlike his companions, he had the capital to invest in a substantial quantity of the stuff--he had been saving up for a car--and he soon found himself in business with a ready-made client base. It turned out that he had a knack for it. He was fair but firm in his transactions and fastidious about record-keeping. The market was ripe and he had stumbled on the right connections at a most opportune time. By his senior year his dealings were bringing in some two hundred dollars a week, without him even trying. That was how he met Anna.

          Reasonably good-looking though he might have been, Anna was clearly out of his league. Olive-skinned and raven-haired, she was an object of desire for every senior boy. She stood smaller and slighter than Jag but walked with her chin pointed upward, so that even at five-foot-six she could look down on the world. Jag thought her positively towering.

         It was quite certain that as of eleventh grade Anna had no knowledge of Jag's existence, but by grade twelve they seemed to run into one another at every opportunity. Out back in the smoker's pit, in the cafeteria, wherever Jag's increasingly shady circle of acquaintances convened she appeared, tossing her lustrous black hair away from her face to gaze at him with imperious and commanding detachment. He began to sweat whenever he found her looking at him, which is to say that he took to bringing deodorant to school.

Jag had succeeded in widening his circle until it encompassed a good third of the student body; in other words, everyone who liked to party. But it wasn't until Anna approached him that he knew he had achieved a truly elevated social status.

         "We'll go see a movie tonight," she had said with the degree of assurance that someone might say, "The sun will rise tomorrow." Jag couldn't respond at first because his throat had gone dry as dust and his heart seemed to have forgotten how to beat. Then he swallowed and stammered and in some haphazard fashion managed to accept the challenge as issued.

         It was a trap, or so it seemed in hindsight. Once she had him, she had no intention of letting him go. It was as if she had divined with her womanly intuition that he would soon reap considerable profits and that he couldn't possibly hoard all that extra money. He would need help spending it.



After high school Jag enrolled in an IT program at a community college while Anna took a job as a bartender. They dated other people, or at least Anna did, but the pretence of leading separate lives was just that. Jag carried Anna's presence with him at all times, his studies watched over by those imperious hazel eyes, his thoughts interrupted by the faultless shape of her caramel-coloured face. It was not just her face that he thought about; other, more exotic parts beckoned from just beyond his reach. She had without any words planted the idea that the paradise beneath her clothing would one day be his to explore. The thought was barely tolerable for any length of time. Whenever Jag began to despair that she had forgotten about him, that her breasts and the uppermost parts of her thighs would forever be confined to his dreams, just then she would phone. "What are you doing?" It was the same question every time, and Jag was compelled to relate, in his cryptic roundabout way, all of his wheelings and dealings. A cynical observer might have thought she was checking the performance of her stocks. Then they would meet at a restaurant he could hardly afford, and under her terrifying, hypnotizing gaze he would babble on about how much better he would treat her once he got himself established in life.

         After Jag graduated and was working full-time he bought a townhouse and Anna moved in with him. By this time Jag's business was rolling. His office job was merely a front to satisfy Revenue Canada, unfortunate but necessary. Before he knew it, Jag found himself living the life of a married man: working nine-to-five, coming home to a peck on the cheek, dinner served but Anna giving hell because this or that wasn't done around the house. A respectable car and TV, washer and dryer, family photos on the mantle. It all happened so fast.

         Anna, of course, had whatever she desired, though only a small portion of what she felt entitled to. Jag was more than happy to spend his money on her if it meant she would sleep with him. Her body was every bit as heavenly as he had envisioned, yet it still felt painfully out of reach; an inappropriate caress would draw him a look of withering indignation, so Jag could never quite get past the awkwardness of their initial union, navigating her body as though it were booby-trapped. Her body, and those fleeting minutes she designated for his enjoyment of it each week, was the bait for the trap in which he was blissfully ensnared. There was no talk of a wedding, no plans for a family. There was plenty of talk, however, of new shoes and dresses and handbags, of trendy nightclubs and pricey restaurants. Jag's schedule didn't even allow him to accompany her on those nightly excursions, since he rose early for work and entertained a steady stream of customers most evenings, so he often left Anna to her own devices while refusing to think about what those devices might be.

She had him, pure and simple, in her thrall.



After a few weeks Jag forgot all about the suspicious Tercel. His customers started feeling at ease again and business picked up. The mortgage was paid for another month. In one burst Jag dispensed with both guys, the utility companies, Visa and MasterCard, and what seemed like a thousand other obligations. They would be back, every one of them, looking for more money next month, but at least now Jag could count his remaining cash and plan for their vacation.

         "Where was it you wanted to go again? Bermuda?" he called out.

         "Bahamas," Anna corrected him from the living room. "We went to Bermuda in the spring, remember?"

         "Sure, sure." All these warm, sandy places were largely the same to him. He was not so fond of them. It just seemed like a way to make his money disappear even faster, and he hardly relaxed while on vacation. Instead he fretted over all the business that wasn't being taken care of back home. On the plus side, it afforded him a rare opportunity to see Anna's delightful little bum in a bikini, though he wished he didn't also have to watch her flirt with the handsome, young, dark-skinned pool boys and bar staff, bestowing on them several of her rare smiles. He had learned over the years that Anna had a finite supply of pleasant facial expressions. Cross and angry expressions, however, she had in endless abundance.

         Jag was counting his money at the kitchen table when Anna sauntered in. She stood there slouching, wearing a bored expression, looking around the room. Jag knew what was coming.

         "The walls in here are ugly," she said.

         "You picked the colour," he reminded her.

         "You said we could paint it soon," she said, ignoring him. "Let's paint it today."

         Jag sighed. "Do we really have to paint it? I think it looks fine."

         "Fine? It reminds me of pee. I don't want to think of pee when I'm having supper."

         Jag couldn't help himself. "But what about the positive energies in this colour?" he said sarcastically. "How will we recharge after a long day if we paint over it?"

         "Are you trying to start a fight?"

         "God, no. I just don't see the point in painting a room twice in two years."

         Jag kept up the argument for longer than usual but knew it was pointless; he was merely trying to preserve what tattered remnants of pride still flapped in the storm of Anna's wrath. He would go and get the paint. He had to go out anyway and see his guys, so he could get the paint on his way back. He vowed not to get suckered into doing all the work this time.



As soon as he took two steps into his townhouse Jag realized that he had forgotten the paint. A wave of panic swept over him as his mind scrambled for excuses. The one most readily available also happened to be true.

         "Someone was following me," Jag hastened to explain as Anna was about to explode. "I must have circled three blocks and this guy made all the same turns I did. He even followed me back here before he drove away."

         "You forgot the paint! How could you forget the paint when that's the whole reason you went out? Where's your brain?" She made a wordless sound of frustration and moved as if to strangle Jag, who stepped back defensively.

         "It wasn't the whole reason," he said. "I had to see my guys and then I had this car following me and I forgot about the paint. Geez, I'm sorry."

         "You're always apologizing for everything," she accused. "Why do you have to be so paranoid? You haven't been in trouble once in your whole life."

         "Exactly. I'm not paranoid; I'm careful."

         Anna threw her hands up in disgust and left the room. Jag sat down at the kitchen table, feeling the queasiness he always felt when Anna gave him hell. But this time it was accompanied by a measure of resentment. It seemed unfair how he was expected to perform some silly dance every time she pulled on his strings. Jag worked five days a week and hardly had a moment's rest at home, what with all the customers coming and going. Anna worked weekends and the odd shift during the week. What she did with the rest of her time, Jag could only imagine. He dared not ask, lest he seem accusatory. And what was his reward? Once a week, if he was lucky, he might get to stroke her fine, slender legs, but only after rubbing her feet. If she was in a self-gratifying mood she might command him to perform certain duties down below, which Jag had enjoyed at first but soon came to dread. She was not easily satisfied and the following day his mouth would be so sore he would have to suck on ice cubes. The worst part was that he rarely succeeded in bringing her to climax and this would leave her frustrated and unwilling to return any favours.

If he did succeed by some miracle, he was rewarded with permission to slip inside her, though only after donning two layers of protection--God forbid she get pregnant. Making love to Anna had once been Jag's favourite fantasy but was now the source of endless anxiety. He inevitably finished up with embarrassing haste, for which he felt obliged to apologize. He needn't have bothered because Anna reacted each time with indifference, which was more excruciating than any show of disappointment would have been. In short, Jag was beginning to feel emasculated.

He was thinking of all these things as he sat at the table. The phone rang but he was in no mood to talk. It rang again and Anna screamed some obscenity from the bathroom, where she had been ensconced the last twenty minutes. Jag still had not moved. Now at last he dug into his pocket and removed the package he had gone out to get. It was, in essence, a special order: a small vial of clear, colourless fluid. It was not something he had ever dealt with before, and his knowledge of it came mostly from pop culture. He was hesitant to deal with something so potent but the profit would be large once he found the market. Several customers had been inquiring about it for years and now he finally had something to sell them.

Jag didn't flinch when Anna flew down the stairs hollering profanities, nor did he look up when she entered the room in a fury, brandishing the phone like a weapon. When she saw him sitting there she stopped dead, momentarily speechless. Then she said, in a voice dripping with scorn, "It's for you, asshole," and hurled the phone at Jag.

A terrible thing happened then. The phone skipped off the surface of the table like a stone off a lake, spinning through the air and striking Jag's hand. It was not a hard throw, more of a toss really, but it struck at such an angle that it broke the top of the vial clean off. Jag was still holding the intact body of the vial, not realizing what had happened, when he found his hand was wet. He looked at his hand, then up at Anna, who was in the process of giving him shit. He let out a girlish, strangled cry and leapt out of his seat, cutting Anna off in mid-stride.

She stared at him as he rushed to the sink, set down the broken vial and rinsed his trembling hands. "What the hell's your problem? What was in there?"

Jag could hardly speak for his shaking voice. "L...S...D," he managed to say.

Anna mulled over this for a moment. "Really?"

"Yes," said Jag through clenched teeth. "And it's all over my hand. Anna, I'm fucked!"

He had never spoken to her so harshly before and it gave her pause. But then she made a dismissive sound. "I don't see what you're so worried about. It's not like it got in your mouth or eyes."

"But it absorbs through the skin, doesn't it?" Jag's voice was tinged with hysteria.

"If you leave it on too long," Anna said, as though it should have been obvious. "But you washed it right off. You'll be fine, babe."

"You think so?" She rarely called Jag 'babe' and it had an immediate soothing effect. She was right, of course. Jag typically overreacted to everything, and Anna had a way of putting matters into perspective.

His panic abated, Jag now had to face the matter of the lost product, another eight hundred dollars down the drain. And just when he seemed to be getting on top of things. He sighed, wiping the spilled acid off the counter with a paper towel. There was no point in complaining or trying to hold her accountable for the loss. His strategy, then, was to mope in silence for the rest of the day in hopes that Anna would feel guilty enough to compensate him in the bedroom later on. The prospect of her actually attending his desires for a change brightened his mood and he needed to remind himself that he was mad at her so as not to spoil the whole plan.

Twenty minutes later Jag was on his way to pick up the paint. He still felt shaky from his close call, acutely aware of his heart thumping in his chest, and he was damp under the arms. His stomach quivered as if from extreme nervousness. Surely just a side-effect of having to absorb a loss of almost a thousand dollars, he thought. But his feeling of unease persisted and seemed to grow with each passing minute.

Then he recalled the car that had followed him. He flicked his eyes to the rearview mirror; a black Jetta behind him held two suspicious-looking occupants. They seemed unnaturally fixated on him. When the passenger leaned over and said something to the driver, while still looking at Jag's Mustang, Jag became convinced that they were on his tail. Paranoia seized him. He stepped on the gas and accelerated right through a stop sign. The blare of a horn followed him. The stop sign also followed; he could still see it streaking past in bright red luminescence. The next moment he realized he was holding onto an eel, alive and writhing in his hands. He let go and narrowly avoided a heart attack when he saw it was just a steering wheel. Thus preoccupied, he was startled by the jolt of his tires striking the curb. More horns blared. Jag was now soaked in sweat. Sharp pains wracked his stomach. Outside his windshield was not the real world but a crudely-drawn, brightly-coloured cartoon. The people on the sidewalk were deformed caricatures; they stared at him with grotesque, bulbous faces.

         Jag had to get out of this labyrinth somehow. He felt something crawling up his leg and would have screamed if he could have found the voice. He had no grasp of what was happening to him but some small part of his brain recognized his surroundings and tried to communicate that he needed to turn around and head the opposite direction. Trees bent and tried to grab hold of his car. He stomped the gas pedal to evade them. The car lurched and the tires squealed. More deformed humanoids turned to regard him with their horrible expressions.

It was perhaps through some higher guiding power that he wound up in front of his townhouse complex. He got out of his car and nearly fell over. The ground swelled and the sky swooped down; he ducked to avoid being squished. Sounds flitted like fairies all around him. He pulled his jacket around his head and made a beeline for the house.

But which one was it? They all looked the same, and with their arched doorways each looked intent on devouring him. He shrank back in terror, trembling before the imposing row of house-faces. Finally he lost his strength and fell back on the grass and wept in feeble impotency. It seemed as if the world was closing up around him, shrinking into a ball, and he let out a faint cry when something grasped his arm.

"Jag!" the creature snarled. "You left your fucking car in the middle of the road!" It had the voice of a serpent. Jag looked up and to be sure it was long and sinuous in form, with shiny skin and reptilian eyes that drilled into his soul. He whimpered and hid his face in his hands.

"God," the creature swore. "Come on. Come inside...right...now!" He was powerless to resist as it pulled him to his feet, and he staggered along behind his captor.

His captivity was mostly a blur. Voices emanated from the walls. The floor swelled and pitched; he lost his footing and spent some time rolling around in a ball, tossed by waves. A repetitive banging sound froze him there on the floor, and even in his deranged state he knew he was finished.



Jag was taken into custody and immediately admitted to the psych ward of the hospital, where he stayed for eight days before being transferred to a mental institution. During his third week there a court-appointed lawyer came to notify him of the list of charges against him, and the seizure of his assets. He would have to stand trial whenever he was deemed mentally fit. Jag didn't respond, nor did he ask about Anna. He knew they would not have found her there when they came to get him. Nor would they find much to indicate her presence, beyond whatever makeup and clothing she left behind in her haste. The house, the car, everything belonged to him. They might look for her, or not. Jag didn't care. Their life together was over. He was a free man at last.