The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Sunday, March 20th

After the session that was supposed to give her back to herself, they tried to be ordinary, and it was the hardest thing they had attempted.

No sessions now. No chair, no cadence, no good subject. Just a couple who studied at The Perch and kissed on the library steps and argued about Milton, whom she defended and he could not finish. He burned rice twice in one week. She laughed at him, and it was a real laugh, and he kept it.

It should have been the happy part. Instead, with the chair and the count gone, Daniel found he no longer knew how to want her. The script had told him what he was allowed to reach for, and how to ask without the humiliation of plain need. Stripped of it, he went careful and stiff, reaching and then not reaching, weighing every want against a ledger that never closed. He was, he understood with a dull horror, a worse man without it than he had been inside it. Now there was just him, and him turned out to be someone who flinched.

The room was colder without the radiator. Priya sat on the edge of the bed in one of his shirts, buttoned wrong. He was on his knees between her thighs because that was the only posture that still felt legible. He kissed the inside of her knee, then higher, waiting for the cue that used to arrive so precisely.

None came.

She touched his hair, gentle, almost absent. When he looked up she was watching the ceiling, not him.

“You don’t have to,” she said.

The words were kind. They were also a removal. He stayed where he was because stopping now would have required deciding what they were doing, and he no longer trusted either of them to choose that correctly. She let him continue. Her body responded, slowly, politely, as one answers a question one has heard before. When she came it was almost silent, like a courtesy. Afterward she pulled him up and held him, her thumb stroking the back of his neck in the exact pattern he had once suggested for calm.

“You were kinder when you were afraid of yourself,” she said into his hair.

He did not answer. The frame was gone and the kindness had gone with it, and neither of them knew how to ask for it back without using the voice that would make the asking a lie. She kept stroking. He kept letting her. Outside, the quad was quiet. The only sound was the faint, irregular click of the heating vents.

Friday, April 8th

It happened in April, on the quad, in the middle of an afternoon that was not about anything.

She was somewhere behind him, far enough that he had not seen her, and she said his name.

And before he turned, before he had placed the voice or found her in the crowd or done any of the work a person does to become glad, he was already glad. The relief arrived first. His shoulders came down. His breath let go. His body had answered as her body had always answered him, ahead of the command, ahead of the choosing, a half-second early and entirely on its own.

He stood with his back to her and let it finish arriving: somewhere in the winter the subject chair had turned to face him, and he had been the one sitting in it for months without knowing.

“Oh,” he said, to no one, to the wet grass, to the spring.

Then he turned, and she was there, and he was glad again, on purpose this time, and the two gladnesses had no seam he could find.

Tuesday, April 12th

The cooking had gone wrong with everything else.

All spring he kept trying to feed her, because feeding her was the one fluent thing his hands still knew, and all spring it came out as either a failure or a command with nowhere to land. He burned the rice. He bought groceries she had not asked for and arranged them in her cupboard like an argument. Twice he caught himself sliding a plate in front of her with more on it than she had taken, the old maneuver, and twice he watched her eat it to be polite, as she now did most things, her body giving him the same automatic yes it had on the quad before she chose to. The meals were as quiet as the sex.

Then in the second week of April she caught a cold, an ordinary one, and went furious and small with it, and he felt the old reflex stand up in him fully armed. A schedule. Fluids by the hour. Sleep enforced. He got as far as the word should before he heard it and closed his mouth.

“Don’t,” she said from under the blanket, reading him as she read everything. “Whatever you were about to organize. Don’t.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You were. Your hands were.”

They were. He put them in his lap.

What she wanted, when she finally said it, was kanji. She had to spell it for him and then describe it, because there was no version of it in his Providence: rice and a great deal of water, boiled past the point where any Italian would have wept and stopped, down to something between a soup and a porridge, soft and plain and barely salted, the food her mother made her when she was small and sick and past performing for anyone. The matta, she said. The red rice, the bag from the last padded envelope. Not the arborio. God, not the arborio.

So he made it under her direction, badly, from the couch, her voice arriving in pieces between the coughing, half of it slipping into a Malayalam she did not translate and he did not ask her to, the syllables landing on him soft and untranslated and somehow exactly enough. He used too little water, then too much. The red grains gave up their shape slowly, as she had told him in his own kitchen a winter ago that they never would, and then they did, boiled long enough, into something soft that was still, unmistakably, itself.

He brought her the bowl. He did not arrange how much was in it.

She sat up and ate the whole thing. Not a corner broken off for show, not the bird’s portion she had lived on in October when he first started watching her not eat: the whole bowl, plainly, sniffling, informing him that he had under-salted it and over-watered it and ruined it in two distinct ways, and finishing every spoonful.

“It’s terrible,” she said. “Make it again tomorrow.”

Then she held the spoon out to him, loaded, and waited. He leaned in and let her feed him the bite. The last person to feed him by hand had been his grandmother, twenty years back in the kitchen off Atwells Avenue. It was, in fact, terrible. It was the first thing he had eaten since the chair that tasted like nothing but itself.

Thursday, April 21st

By April the radiator in M-14 had gone quiet.

All winter its hiss had been the room’s second occupant, breathing in the pauses. Now the silence had nothing to stand behind. Four chairs, one table, three fossil candies going gray on the sill. The high window offered its usual ration of spring: wet brick, a rung of fire escape, a strip of sky the color of the underside of a wrist.

He had come for the cards. He had said so to himself the whole walk from Belden Street. The pale blue ones she had bought him, rubber-banded, his name on the top one in her exact hand. Not Daniel. D. De Luca. As if he were the one who had been catalogued.

They were in the table drawer, under a dead marker and a stack of old consent forms. He stood there holding them and waited for the room to acknowledge him. It didn’t. Nothing in it had changed enough to match what he was.

On the board, under a semester of erasing, two ghosts. Placebo effects, faint as a bruise beneath skin. And newer, larger, mostly gone:

NOTHING HAPPENS

The rest had worn off in the cleaning. You chose to come here. You chose this. Every clause that had made the words safe was gone, and what remained could have been a comfort or a verdict.

The door opened behind him.

He knew before he turned.

Priya, in the navy coat, hair down and caught from the wind. More of her than there had been in October, not much, enough; the canvas bag still dragging one shoulder lower no matter how many times he had told her to switch sides. She looked tired and she looked well, and both of them hurt.

“I thought you might be here.” She saw the cards, then the board, and stayed on the words. “They really never erase anything in this room.”

“No.”

She came in and let the door fall shut. She did not take the subject chair. He hated that he counted it.

“You don’t have to look like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re still waiting to find out what you did.”

The rubber band printed a line in his thumb. “I am.”

She studied the board a while. Then, gently, as you set down a thing you have carried too far: “I was never under. Not the way you were afraid of. I chose all of it.”

He heard his own voice from February: You were never under. Whatever you did, you chose. He had said the words because he needed them to be true and had tried to rub the need off them. Now she was giving them back.

“I chose all of it.” She turned from the board, and for a second she was October again: scarf at her throat, chin down, waiting to be called on though she already knew the answer and feared it. “Wasn’t I?”

Should he have lied?

He looked for the flash. The one from the green dress, from the chair, the private amusement at the corner of her mouth that had made him sure, at the end, that she had been running him the whole way, the closest thing to proof he had let himself take. He had braced to find it, half wanted to, because a woman who had been ahead of him all along did not need him to be careful with her. It was not there. What was on her face he had no winter of practice for and no card to file it under: a person who did not know, asking the one man alive who could not tell her. Or so he read it. He had been wrong about this face every time it had counted, and he knew it, and he still could not make it mean anything but true.

He opened his mouth.

Yes would lie down in her like a suggestion. Silence would build the room her doubt had to live in. Every word he reached for he had already written somewhere, in his own hand, on a card, on the board, into her in a voice he could not unlearn.

Except one.

“I don’t know,” he said. He kept it flat, ordinary, his, the she had taught him in a cold kitchen a winter ago. “I’m never going to know. Neither are you. That’s the only thing I have that I didn’t get to first. I spent all of it trying to give you certainty. I never once tried to give you this.”

For a moment her face gave him nothing, held flat and shut by an act of will he could feel from across the room, and he braced for the door, the cold walk back through a spring that had stopped meaning anything.

Then her jaw loosened. She crossed the small room and stopped in front of him and took the cards out of his hand, D. De Luca, her own neat catalogue of him, and set them on the table.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, neither of us knows.” She almost smiled. “I can stay in that. If you’re in it too.”

He looked for the harm. He found it, of course, and let it be.

Her chin was up now, not lowered, waiting on nothing. The wanting in her face was unmistakable and possibly hers and possibly his and would never, now, be sorted, and she had decided to keep it anyway.

Behind her the two words held on the board. NOTHING HAPPENS.

He took her hand. Hers, or the one he had taught to find his. He stopped asking which.

Outside and above, the campus went on toward dinner, toward papers. Priya reached over and turned the lights off, as she had always liked them. In the dark she did not let go, and neither did he.

He was certain of nothing.

Against every argument he could still have made, he was glad.