Eternity is absence—EM Cioran
I see Anna every day, sitting on my workbench in her underwear, smoking Parliaments, not getting tortured, not getting beat, not getting fucked when she least expects it—I see her getting soft and I know it's my fault for making her life too comfortable.
"You should start meditating. An hour a day."
"I'm not going to meditate an hour a day—I don't care what you say."
"Well ten minutes for every cigarette, then."
"Cigarette smoking is a meditation."
"Have you ever thought of burning Kimmie with those?"
Kimmie looks at me, wide eyed.
Anna says, "Where?"
"Wherever you think it will hurt her the most..in her mind."
"Her nipples?"
"That's what I was thinking."
"No, you two. You two, no," Kimmie said.
But Anna was already going toward the 17 year old's exposed body with her lit Parliament.
I'll leave out the part where Kimmie screams, with each burn, knowing she's losing sensation—permanently—in what she considers some of the most important places on her body.
And I'll leave out how much I enjoyed it.
But I won't leave this out: how much Anna enjoyed it. How Anna just didn't tap the cherry of the cigarette on the girl's nips, she twisted it in like she was putting the cigarette out on those motherfuckers.
And yeah, I enjoyed Kimmie screaming.
And I enjoyed even more looking at her face and trying to imagine what she was thinking.
But seeng Anna burn off a 17 year old's nipples with her cigarettes..and seeing her do it again and again and again until Kimmie's nips were pretty much useless..well it made my cock as hard and mean as a dragon, and it was everything I could do to hold back from raping Kimmie while Anna did it.
But this was Anna's moment.
Maybe the moment when she embraced some conquering and control.
Or maybe she was just bored and wanted to fuck a motherfucker up.
I know that happens to me sometimes.
Anna would get creative with this shit. She'd sit at the foot of the chair and put her toes inside Kimmie's pussy while she smoked her cigarettes. She would rub her toes on the younger girl's clit.
"That feels weird," Kimmie would say.
"I know. I want you to feel weird. Is it weird like right and wrong at the same time?"
"Yeah."
"Yeah. That's what I want you to feel."
And Anna would do this to Kimmie for hours while chain smoking Parliaments.
When I wanted to rape Kimmie I would go and stand beside Anna and she'd get the idea. She'd move aside for as long as it took me to cum and then go back to manipulating our slave with her toes.
One day I was fucking Kimmie in the mouth and Anna was sitting behind me torturing that dead girl's clit.
Anna got very quiet and eventually said:
"I'm afraid we're going to get caught."
I kept on going, trying to cum down Kimmie's throat. I was half-hoping she'd choke to death on the combination of my cock and my cum so I didn't have to go to the trouble of shooting her in her empty little head.
"Don't think that. Don't think, 'I'm afraid we're going to get caught.' You'll make it more likely to happen."
"Who are you, Deepak Chopra?"
I took my cock out of Kimmie's mouth and she made a sound like a snorkel.
I turn to Anna, my ass directly over Kimmie's mouth.
She immediately started licking my asshole because she knew if she didn't, I would shock her pussy with the extension cord.
"You know what they teach Navy SEALs, first day in the program?"
"What do they teach Navy SEALs?"
"Ok this is combat—just a basic combat class. They teach them not to think about possibilities in a fight that they don't want to happen because thinking it makes it more likely to happen. That's not Deepak Chopra. That's the US government. And that's just Navy SEALs—which, believe me, are like the school crossing guards of military commandos—you've just never heard about the rest of them."
"I didn't realize it was all so spiritual."
"It's all spiritual. The whole fucking program is spiritual."
"That's what you were, a Navy SEAL?"
"No."
"Let me guess, you taught Navy SEALs."
"No. I stalked Navy SEALs. Snuck up on them in the night in the middle of the jungle, put a knife to their neck and said, 'Gotcha.' Then we meditated for nine hours."
"I just never imagined Navy SEALs mediating."
"The whole program is meditation. All of life is meditation. Don't go meditating us into prison by imagining it so. Imagine the outcome you want to happen..please..because it does make a difference."
"What else did you do in those programs?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Let's find out."
"Time travel. Meeting with interdimensional beings. Creating ad-hoc portals with our minds—something we've forgotten from our bipedal cousins who we share the planet with to this day—"
Anna laughs.
"I said you wouldn't believe me."
"I just thought..the US military..was about atomic bombs and drones and counterterrorism..shit like that."
"I don't know. I never worked for the US military. But I'm telling you: think positive or you're going to have FBI agents swarming our motherfucking house. Imagine yourself on a beach or something. I'm serious. Whatever your favorite geography is—imagine yourself there. And imagine yourself free. And don't ever, ever think of something that you don't want to appear in front of your face. Because it will."
Then I turned back around, and I stuffed my cock into Kimmie's mouth, and I got it hard, and I fucked that girl's throat until she was trying not to choke to death and when I was done I took it out and she was still choking but this time every time her head spasmed, blobs of my cum came out her nose.
When it was night, and Anna had had her fun putting cigarettes out all over Kimmie, making the girl look like a goddamn leopard, I took the remote control from the workbench and put on one of the mind-control videos I had collected over the years.
"No!" said Kimmie. "It's too weird."
"Do you have bad dreams when I play these?"
"I don't have any dreams."
"Do you ever dream of getting out of here?"
"No."
"Probably for the best."
"What makes that a mind-control video?" Kimmie asks. "How is watching that controlling my mind?"
"Have you ever heard of a confusion induction?" I say.
The video plays in the background but I turn the sound way down.
"No," Kimmie says.
"It's from hypnotism," I say.
"It's probably too complicated for me to understand, right? I'd have to be a Navy SEAL to get it?"
"No, you can understand it."
While I explain, Anna sits on the workbench listening.
"So, a confusion induction is a hypnotic technique where if you confuse someone's conscious mind enough, their conscious mind will shut off, and then you have access to their subconscious mind. To do this, you say phrases or show someone images that kind of make sense but are really nonsensical. When someone is barraged in such a fashion, it causes their conscious mind to give up—give up on trying to understand, give up on trying to control the brain, give up on trying to operate at all. At that point the person's subconscious mind is open to you."
"Is this real?" Kimmie asks.
"This is ancient science," I say. "As real as the cigarette burns on your pretty little nipples. Real as my cock in your puss any time I fucking want it there."
"What does that have to do with the weirdo videos you show me? Or will it mess it up if you explain it to me?"
"Oh no," I laugh. "This works whether you understand it or not."
"So what the fuck are those videos?"
"Don't say fuck," Anna says. "Or I'll burn your clit off with my next cigarette."
"I think she's serious," I say. "I'll try not to cuss, either—we don't want to piss her off. The videos are carefully designed to create associations in your brain which your brain thinks make sense but actually don't—to confuse your conscious mind so it shuts down, remember?"
Kimmie looks at the TV. She scrunches her face.
"Do you understand?"
"No."
"Let's try a verbal example. It may be easier to grasp that way. What if I were to say to you: Kimmie, look at my face. But remember, there is no need for you to make what is surely an unnecessary effort to pay close attention to me. Who am I? This whole process is all about you—primarily your ability to loosen every tight spot in your mind, in your body—as you listen to me, as you listen to yourself. But you know at any time you can let go of every effort to listen and instead expend the unnecessary energy to scrutinize the truth of what I say happens..or doesn't happen. What you know may seem like one thing but turn out to be another. See? When I say one thing, that cancels out another. I say expend the unnecessary energy but also scrutinize the truth.
"That is a decent example of a verbal confusion induction. One can use this in almost any situation. It's extremely difficult to detect and without fail it causes someone's mind to shut off. The big question is..is this ok, Anna..can I get into some of the bigger issues?"
Anna nods. She lights a cigarette and sits completely quietly, perched on the workbench in a pair of sweats and a bra.
"The bigger question," I say, the ideas exciting my brain, "is in a situation where you're confusing someone—either on purpose or incidentally—with a subject matter they don't understand..like you're teaching them calculus or quantum programming or another concept that's over their head..in this circumstance, does that person's conscious mind shut off somewhat, allowing you access to their subconscious? I would argue that this is simply an example of a well-hidden confusion induction and therefore the answer would have to be yes."
If either Anna or Kimmie had been paying attention to the excitement that lit within me, being able to explain such thrilling concepts even to such a small classroom as we held within that crate, they would have had an easy time guessing my longest-running profession, aside from trapping and destroying young women.
"So why are you trying to brainwash me?"
"This isn't brainwashing, it's mind control."
"Why are you trying to mind control me?"
"Because his MO is control," Anna says. "He prob'ly doesn't care if he mind controls you to eat his shit or chew a stick of gum."
Anna looks straight at me as she speaks.
"He gets off on control, and this is just his little hobby before he executes your hippie ass. If he could mind control you to pick your nose and eat it, he'd prob'ly cum in his fucking sweatpants."
"Is that why you're trying to break into my mind?" Kimmie says.
"Who says I'm trying to break into your mind? Maybe I'm trying to break into Anna's. Maybe I'm trying to break into my own. Maybe I'm not doing this alone—did you ever consider that? Did you ever think that everything I do to you, every day, comes from someone who's giving me orders? Maybe all three of us are being watched, and if I do the wrong thing, I'll get killed. You gotta think outside the box, ladies. Anna asked me how I knew only to carry three milligrams of scopolamine instead of the usual four to eight milligrams when we came to meet you at Betsy's Diner. Anna asked me how I knew you'd be small and I said, 'Good guess.' But how unlikely is that? How unlikely it is that the first day Anna and I left the house, we found you? I had been sitting at Betsy's for a month before Anna came to me. Did you ever consider that someone might have been on that bus, watching you, telling me about you, for three states before you finally got off in Pain?"
"Is that true?"
"I'm not saying it's true—I'm saying did you consider it? You remember in Se7en, when Detective Somerset says, 'If John Doe's head splits open and a UFO should fly out, I want you to have expected it?' Remember that? That's how you should be thinking. That's how you should be thinking."
"You're brainwashing us right now," Anna says. "You've been playing the mind-control video all this time, you spoke a verbal confusion induction with both of us in the crate, and now you're planting all kinds of scary ideas in our heads like you're working with another person and that you're being controlled, too—when in reality only you're doing the controlling. This is mind control right now."
I snap my fingers and point to Anna.
"That's why you are walking free and she is clamped to a fucking gyno chair."
I turn the sound way up on the video and exit the crate.
Anna locks the door with us both on the outside.
Kimmie can be heard saying, "Fuck you, fuck you," and then crying quietly.
All the while in the background the crazy cartoon plays. I knew, in a way that no one else in that house possibly could, that the video Kimmie was watching was no child's toy. It was designed by a small team of some of the most studied and most diabolical psychologists in the world, and even Anna and I, exposed only to its soundtrack, were now the subjects of one of the sickest confusion inductions ever used on humans—the audio alone was opening our deeper minds to suggestions from everything we said to each other, to our own subconscious minds, to Kimmie's crying, to the shape of the house, to the crickets outside rubbing their wings together—everything.
Right then, listening to that mind-control sequence, was the worst time for Anna and I to have a pillow conversation.
But that's exactly what we did.