Authors: Anneke Jacob
As She’s Told – Anneke Jacob
I had the streetcar rides to provide at least a little bit of transition time.
And then, of course, at work, just as I would start to adjust and get into my job, I'd move without thinking or try to take a deep breath, and suddenly my hands would tremble and my insides would surge. I'd feel Anders holding me, manipulating me, body and mind, like the thing that I was. Then I'd have to force an impassive expression onto my face, and pretend that I existed only in the time and place where I stood.
Apparently some people with mild schizophrenia are quite aware that their hallucinations aren't real, and manage to function normally by simply ignoring them. I seemed to have no choice but to do the same thing.
Each day became a surreal juxtaposition of oddly-assorted segments.
The morning ritual developed into a tightly-scheduled routine in which Anders shifted me from one bondage to the next – chained to the bed, to the ceiling, to the wall – while he washed and fed and harnessed me. Every morning I was led from one place to another in lockstep, with no more than a foot or two of leeway at the end of my leash.
Every morning I hunkered down on the floor in front of that red dish and felt, as I was meant to feel, like a dumb beast. A dumb beast that was capable of knowing its own humiliation. I got food on my face, in my hair till he tied it back, even on the mat. I was routinely told off and smacked for the mess, for trying to speak when I was supposed to be eating, for failing to have my bowl clean and well-licked by the time he was finished. At the end of each meal he'd come at my woebegone face with a big cloth, engulf and swab it, scolding all the while.
Upstairs, he reduced me down in another way, squeezing the breath from me as he pulled the harness tight. This wasn't as limiting overall as the corset; I could bend more easily, get my back into things. But it constricted every breath, every move.
The only things I was allowed to do for myself in the mornings were washing and blow drying my hair (Anders kept an eye on me but said he wasn't going to take the Barbie thing that far), brushing my teeth and putting on the outward, public layer – stockings, dress, shoes. No makeup. At his request I had shown him what I looked like in the minimal makeup I sometimes wore, and he decided I looked better without it.
There was a moment of transition when he unlocked the collar, and took off the cuffs, if he hadn't already. Then I was out the door, ostensibly free. I 149
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could use my limbs, walk without orders or a leash, choose to step this way or that around a puddle. I could walk down the street, get on a streetcar and go to work, just like a normal person. The bondage I was in wasn't visible to the naked eye. (Good thing those x-ray glasses in the old comics never worked.) No one could tell, either, that I had in my small bag exactly two tokens, a small ring of keys, a cellphone, and some ID in case I fell under a bus.
I piloted my weird, divided self through the information centre doors and on into work, and did my best there. The trick was to focus on what was in front of me and try to minimize input from the rest of my senses. I distanced as best I could from the bound and vulnerable slave's body beneath my clothes, kept a straight, professional face, and handed over to the afternoon shift at one o'clock. Then I walked out and headed for home.
Once on the streetcar, I found myself reinhabiting my restraints with a rush. Every strap made itself felt as it tied and demarcated the various bits of me. The harness made a display, a kind of smorgasbord of my sexual parts.
A nice breast or buttock on a platter, so to speak. None of it was mine; all of it was offered up to my owner, to take or to leave. Internal currents surged as I stared out the window, divided from the world by glass and secrets.
At first I didn't think much about the fact that the harness was locked, just as the corset had been. There were too many things bidding for my attention. But one day toward the end of the first week I got seriously entangled in that little reality. It was the day I was on my own in the centre for the first time, and I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. I still didn't know where everything was, and one or two people got politely impatient with me.
I tried to look calm as I took twice as long as I should have to locate what they needed. Six new boxes of reports had been plunked down in the middle of the floor, and I kept tripping over them. Then, of course, my computer locked up just when I needed it most.
At last to my relief there was a lull; the place emptied. I headed for the boxes to get them out of the way. And I couldn't bend properly. I couldn't take a deep breath. All at once there were straps digging in everywhere. I wriggled and tugged in irritation and impatience. I have get out of this, I thought.
The next thing I knew I was in the bathroom with my dress up to my armpits, trying to loosen the straps. I must have been way more stressed out 150
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than I realized: neurons firing in bursts, sending my carefully launched body into out-of-control trajectories. For a minute I just lost it. My fingers scrabbled on the smooth leather and met over the joins: those metal pieces with their little keyholes. The broad belt that reduced my waist had two of them at the back, one above the other. I tugged and pulled at the solid straps in frustrated jerks, my confused aggravation and helplessness rising and going nova in exponential chaos. I couldn't unbuckle anything. All I could manage was tiny shifts forward or back. None of it would loosen any of it by even a centimetre. It was truly locked.
Anders had the key. There was an instant in which I envisioned calling him and asking him to come and let me out. I heard myself laugh. Surely, I thought, it could come off some other way, and be replaced later, with my master none the wiser.
I shivered, suddenly sick, feeling the cliff beneath my feet crumble and slide. My hands pressed the belt into my waist; my eyes squeezed shut. Self-inflicted disaster: here it came; the rumblings of an eight-point-one earthquake that would engulf me and everything I had ever wanted.
Wait. Slow down.
I made my hands move. Carefully, methodically, I felt over the whole harness. Pulled at the metal joins, felt for irregularities or ways to loosen the straps. There were none. No weak points, no way out. No way to play sly and false.
The nightmare sublimated up through cell walls, slipped out at my pores, its sour panic stink dispersing into the air above my head. My impulses had no power here. He'd made me safer than I knew.
My trapped flesh, swelling between the straps, was now responding to the lightest touch. Hurriedly I smoothed my dress down, gave myself a minute to recover, and then went back to work. By the time I'd moved the last box I'd figured out how to lift heavy objects without going to pieces.
Despite myself, the locks did prey on my mind for a while. Was I really safe? Could they be picked, I wondered? I had no idea how to do that, and even if I had, these were all behind my back, no doubt on purpose. And something told me that Anders wouldn't have used any hardware easy to defeat.
But the urge to seek a way out still lurked, a horrid little goblin. On warmer days, sweat and irritation could overtake immediate arousal. It was, 151
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let's face it, a long day of constant restriction and constriction. I endured, day after day like a good slave, and then I endured more strenuously, and then I suffered and resented and came close to whining when I saw the harness.
Despite myself I began to wonder, depressed and dispirited, whether such 24/7 physical control was realistic or just Anders' fantasy. Could he be mistaken? Horrible thought. My desire had survived all the beatings and humiliation, had of course been enhanced by them, but would it survive this?
The day came when, for hours at a time, the damned thing just wasn't fun any more.
It took several days of this before I finally admitted to myself, very reluctantly, that the harness wasn't truly inescapable; that is, technically. It could be cut off. But this possibility was almost unthinkable in the context of the relationship we were in. Despite my rebellious thoughts the word
'sacrilege' occurred to me; I suppressed it because it seemed so silly, but it was pretty representative of how I felt. The destruction would extend far beyond a leather strap or two. Except, I supposed, in an emergency, like an accident or something. In which case someone else would cut it off, not me.
I imagined myself in the emergency room, and then I stopped. Too horrible and humiliating, and not the good kind, either. What other possible situation would justify such an action? I couldn't imagine any, except if he got run over by a car and was no longer with me, a scenario that carried with it such a devastating tidal wave of loss that I hurriedly cut off that line of speculation also.
Anders watched my face and body, examined and soothed my skin, and made small adjustments in fit and tension. And every morning he chained my wrists above my head, pulled the harness tight with those long, firm, confident hands, closed the locks and smiled gently in the mirror at my distress.
I thought about begging for even a day of respite, with the lurking hope that he might get the message and let me off the daily regime. I even thought about saying something during question time. I could entertain that thought because the date wasn't any time soon; once it got close my mind would reject the subject without reading it. It was like the CD player in my dad's old car which had a mind of its own; certain CDs would go in and then come right back out again.
But the harness dilemma wasn't going away. I was suppressing my 152
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grumpiness with a serious effort.
One night I dreamed I was in the back room at work, opening and sorting an enormous pile of mail. The sun streamed in through the high windows; I was glad the windows were high, because I was wearing nothing at all except my harness. Dust motes hovered in the sultry air; my sweaty skin prickled. I got out the snippers and attacked a pile of delivery boxes bound round with plastic strapping. When they were all open I looked down at my body, and kept going. It took both hands on the snippers to get through the strap that crossed my chest, but at last I hacked my way through it. My chest expanded in triumph. I went on chopping and slicing at the straps, ignoring the small, painless nicks I was inflicting on my skin in my haste. The nicks began to bleed; still I continued. Then a breast strap came away wet and half my breast came away with it, and I tried to scream but all that came out was a strangled whisper. Still the cutting went on, more chunks of flesh sliding their reeking snail trails down to the floor around my feet. I had the snippers at my neck. And then with a jerk I woke.
It was ages before my heart stopped racing. God, I thought, can't my subconscious come up with anything more subtle than that? Christ, Maia, how pathetic. But scolding myself didn't work; sleep wouldn't come, despite the reassurance of my intact form against the sheets, and Anders' warm arm over me. So in the morning I was too tired to behave; at the sight of the harness I lost it and burst into tears.
Anders mopped and soothed me where I stood. Gently he stroked me and kissed my wet face. "It's uncomfortable sometimes, isn't it." It was a statement, not a question. "You're a good girl to have held on so long." The kindly, deep voice made me sob with shame, for my failure, my weak petulance. "But you'll adjust to it eventually. Belly in." The belt went on as tight as ever. Then the chest straps. As his fingers adjusted the strap over one shoulder I turned and kissed his hand.
That day was better. I moved within my boundaries as if I'd finally learned where they were. I couldn't think much that day; I was too tired, but without the threat of choice I settled in somehow. And arousal surged again at unexpected moments: a promise for the future. From that point on I seemed to be over the worst. The binding was starting to feel normal.
Probably geishas and corseted ladies and neck-ringed Padaung women have felt the same. Did they get a sexual charge out of it, too, I wondered, or was 153
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that just for the men for whom they were supposedly packaged?
I pondered this one day on the streetcar home. They'd have been lucky if they did get a sexual charge, having no choice about the bondage they were in. I began to feel very lucky myself. Paradoxically, I had chosen this; at least, I'd chosen the man who'd chosen it, and I'd known what I was getting into. It was a very private, personal deal. Bindings imposed on women by society or culture, though, that was real oppression, surely? A route to conformity and acceptance, but no joy.
I wondered why I felt good and self-righteous about having made that original choice, given that the bare notion of having any choice now was such anathema to me. Feminist slaves have a lot to sort out.
As the streetcar crossed the Don and I got closer to home, my attention shifted to the next segment of my day. My time alone but unfree, keeping company with cameras. Instructions I'd have to follow to the letter, hardware to put on. Every day I'd been chained up, one way or another, to myself or to something else. Not a minute of freedom. Every day I closed the locks under the hall camera's watchful eye.
A couple of days back, there had been short chains with padlocks at each end, and instructions to fasten my ankles to rings on either side of my belt. His list of chores included tidying up newspapers and other debris, filling and running the dishwasher, scrubbing the kitchen floor and dusting as high up as I could reach. I crawled from chore to chore and knelt up to reach newspapers and dishes and shelves. There was no efficient way to crawl and carry at the same time, and I resigned myself to making many trips. My knees were rather red by the time Anders got home. The next day there had been kneepads waiting for me in the hall. Today there were no kneepads; there was a long chain to lock to my collar, already fastened at the other end to the woodwork between living room and kitchen. There was also a very short chain for my ankles.