“Arrrrgggghhhhhh.” She sat up, rubbing her upper arms with her hands. “I always get that. Simply because I can’t help keeping my head in situations. Jesus. Even when I was a kid.” She stopped and looked away.
“What?”
“What what? I was finished.”
“No, you weren’t. What happened when you were a kid?”
“Nothing.”
“Someone said you weren’t human?”
She looked at him, exasperated. “No. I was just always like this. And people don’t understand it. Maybe my way of dealing with shit is to be rational. And that, apparently, is the only unacceptable approach.” For a moment, she looked irritated at something other than what was going on around her, he thought. “Apparently, to be ‘human,’ is to be an idiot.”
He looked at her with recognition. “Now, that’s how I’ve always felt.”
“You’re one of the idiots,” she said, sharply.
His expression began to cloud up, so she added, “Oh, god. Go ahead, hit me, fuck me, I don’t care. I’m going to pee, here or somewhere else, and then I’m going to get some sleep. I’m exhausted. If you don’t want me to drop dead, I need some rest.”
“Please. You could go a lot longer without sleep and still survive – physically. I know this from personal experience. But I don’t have a problem with a nice, snuggly nap. Go ahead. But I want you to crawl to the bathroom. And I’ll be right behind you.”
She crawled. Off the carpet and over the hard wooden floor of the dining room, the linoleum of the kitchen, and down the hardwood floor of the hallway until she reached the bathroom. He stood again at the doorway while she urinated. Thus, it was inevitable that he heard her fart several times. She tried not to look embarrassed when he laughed.
“That’s from air inside me, air that you put inside me with your actions, if you know what I mean.”
“I don’t care. It’s still funny.”
She just grumbled something to herself while she wiped, then she flushed and washed her hands.
“Yes, by all means,” he said, as she did. “We don’t want germs to hurt you.”
“Now what?” she asked.
“You see? How naturally you accept my leadership now. I like that.”
She made a face at him.
“Ridicule. The last resort of the powerless,” he said quietly. Then he took her hand and pulled her back into her bedroom, pushed her onto the bed, and arranged himself and her so that she was curled up inside his arms and legs, pretty much immobilized, and he was comfortable. She didn’t help, but she didn’t obstruct his efforts. She just waited until he had her exactly as he wanted her, and then she closed her eyes.
“No, not yet,” he said softly. “I want to talk some more.”
“Grrrrr.”
“Be grateful. This is a break for you.”
She said nothing.
He waited.
“What do you want to talk about?” she finally asked.
“You.”
“I’m bored of me. What about you?”
“No interest.”
“Politics?”
“Funny.”
“Then what? Jesus. Don’t think for a minute that I’m not aware of the absurdity of this situation.”
“Now you’re beginning to understand me. I live for the absurdity of this situation.”
“But you said this doesn’t happen most of the time.”
“Oh. Not just the way you’re behaving. That’s true. I just find this situation always absurd.”
“The situation that you create.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it.”
“People think they’re so great. So smart, so powerful, so dignified. Not when I’m around, they’re not. Except for you, minus the dignity and power. You are smart. You don’t give up your reason. Most people will give up anything.” He gave her a little squeeze. “Anything to survive. In all honesty, I think your cats probably
are
infinitely superior.”
“Well, I’ll agree with you on that one.” Her head was cushioned on one of his arms. “But you know? The other part. No. It’s not absurd, and it’s not pathetic. Did you ever read
1984
?”
He looked puzzled. “Yes. In school.”
“Ok. There’s that Room 101 or whatever number it was. Where, threatened with the thing he is most afraid of, he says ‘do it to her, not to me.’ Right?”
“Um huh.”
“And that apparently signals the utter destruction of his soul, of his concept of himself as a human being. He’s destroyed because he did that.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I never understood that.”
“What?”
“Why did he expect so much of himself? He expected himself to be superhuman, not human. If you don’t expect what is beyond any human to do, then you won’t be disappointed or destroyed because an unrealistic picture you had of yourself is shattered. Do you know what I mean?”
She felt him shake his head a little against hers.
“He had too high an opinion of himself – as a human. We’re just animals. We’re just trying to survive. A lot of the time, we’re capable of being pretty good. But when the worst is facing us, most of us at some point will do whatever we have to. To survive. That’s not wrong. That’s just human.” She took a breath. “So I always thought Winston was too hard on himself. That he shouldn’t have expected that he would be better than almost anyone could be. That he should have blamed the guy who was forcing him to make that choice. Not himself. It’s the illusions we have about ourselves that destroy us. If we don’t have them, we can’t be destroyed.”
She heard him take a deep breath.
“You’re talking about yourself.”
“All of us.”
“Yes, but this is about me and what I’m doing here.”
“Maybe.”
He spoke completely seriously now. “I don’t know if I’m prepared to accept that you have
no
illusions about yourself. It’s very clever of you to claim that. But I’ve never met anyone who has. And I’ll have to do a bit more experimenting before I accept that hypothesis.”
“I knew you wouldn’t listen.”
“Oh, I’m listening.”
“Because you have your own set of illusions. And you don’t want to give those up.”
“Careful.”
“I’m just saying.”
“There’s no ‘just’ in anything you’re saying.”
“It’s just a warning, not a threat. In this kind of situation, the one with the fewest illusions about himself wins.”
“It appears you’d like to convince me of that. But I’ve destroyed too many people to believe you. It’s the recognition of utter powerlessness that destroys. That’s what’s going to destroy you. Even though, I have to say, I’ll be a little bit sorry to see it happen.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“I have to.”
“Then that means you’re in this now the way that I am.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“You can’t stop it.”
“Maybe I don’t want to.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“Nice.” He put one hand on her breast and she instinctively wriggled as if to escape him. “Maybe you want to believe that your conscious mind can stay in control. But there’s a whole lot of you you’re not in control of. Feelings you can’t stop. Like that,” he said, as he flicked her nipple with his fingers. “I can do what I want with you. And that will either make you unbearably angry or inescapably hopeless, but by the time I’m done, you won’t be you. Not this you. Still fighting with the one weapon you do have.” He touched her head with his other hand. “This you is going to be broken. And that will be the sweetest thing I’ve ever done,” he murmured.
“You’re an idiot,” was all she said, quietly, but in a disgusted and dismissive voice.
“Go to sleep,” was his uncharacteristically patient reply. And, after lying wordlessly in his arms for a while, thinking about the gun that was so close, and yet so far, she actually did.
She slept for a little while, but she was sorry when she woke up. Because she’d had a terrible dream. Not terrible in the sense of being filled with monsters or even being directly about him. She had been in her old house. There was a man there who she knew was a friend, even though there was no real-life counterpart to him. And she noticed something small and quick scurrying along the wall of the dining room. This was after she had opened the basement door and seen that there was water up to almost the third step down. The basement was flooded. Now she crawled on the floor with a folded magazine to kill whatever bug she had seen, but when she finally came close to it, she realized that it was a baby bat. She called to her friend. At first he didn’t come; he was looking at something else. Nor did he sense or respond to the urgency in her voice. Finally, with tears in her eyes, she got his attention, but instead of focusing on the bat, he was worried about her, thinking she was overreacting. Concerned about her emotional state, but not her situation. For that, she was on her own. Whether people were around or not. There was a threat: a baby bat could still carry rabies and needed to be dealt with. But she would have to try to figure out how to handle it herself. As for the flooded cellar, she imagined that meant either that she was on the verge of being overwhelmed or she was losing her foundation. Or both. What a sucky dream. She really could have used something a bit more encouraging.
This guy really liked to talk. It was probably, she figured, the only time when he really could. A man like him probably had very little in the way of social interaction except for the most superficial situations. Probably he couldn’t experience real intimacy with anyone. But he knew about it, had read about it or seen it on TV or at the movies, and tried to recreate it in this world that he constructed with his victims. Her world now.
She thought maybe that was what the dream was about. She was on her own. Always. Dealing with the madness that the world brought in. Why hadn’t she learned by now that there was no escaping that?
“This is the best moment for me,” he said softly. He’d let her sleep for a couple of hours while he dozed lightly, waking up with every unconscious attempt to shift her position. He had also maneuvered his penis back inside her.
“Oh, god,” she groaned.
“Ask me why,” he said, thrusting gently.
“Why?” she said, with no enthusiasm.
“It’s just the best moment. When she first wakes up and doesn’t know what exactly is happening. And then. The dawn of horror as she senses what’s going on with her own body. It’s awe inspiring. To be able to do that to someone. I’m really proud of myself for inventing that opening gambit. Horror, panic, terror, and the best part, sometimes, unconscious arousal because she’s been asleep but her body was responding. Oh, yes,” he said, with joy. “It’s incredible.”
“Really,” she said. “I’ll try it sometime.”
“Oh, I wish you could. It was like that with you, too, even though unusually short-lived, since you got right down to business taking me at my word.” He paused for a moment. “It’s amazing. That’s when they first know, and often, give up. Right then. They know that they do not belong to themselves anymore. They belong to me. It’s glorious.”
“Yeah. I get it. You’re god.”
“Yes, I guess so.” He nodded to himself.
“I love how you give yourself airs. I assume because you’re doing this at somebody else’s behest — making you some kind of professional – but really, you’re just a rapist.”