THE JULIETTE SOCIETY 4 page

Bad dog.

I look up at him and cry out, pathetically. And it just makes him more angry. My master hates my guts and I feel sad. I feel like I want to curl up and hide in a corner and chew on a nice, tasty bone.

Marcus is talking about the secrets we keep in dreams, about the secrets we keep that threaten to consume us.

I am on all fours on top of the desk with my head resting on my front paws and my ass stuck up in the air as high as it will go. Marcus has two fingers deep in my pussy and his thumb lodged in my asshole, like he’s standing on the highway trying to hitch a ride. I’m wagging my behind and whimpering with pleasure. And all is forgiven.

I am my master’s bitch.

Anna is late to class. Anna walks in and all the men stand to attention. Marcus stands to attention. And Anna is on her knees in front of him. She has her head buried in his crotch. She is sucking in the secret scent that was known only to me. She is lapping at the place where I once was. But I’m not jealous. I’m not worried that I’ve lost his affections to another. I’m happy to share my obsession. Happy to share my master with my best friend.

Marcus is talking about Séverine’s need to annihilate herself through sex. And I am my master’s slave. I will do anything he demands. I will submit to his desires and make them mine. I want to annihilate myself on his sex.

But my master has other ideas. He wants to save Anna for himself. He wants me for all the others.

Marcus is directing all the men in class to form a line. One by one. Two by two. Like the animals in the ark. He directs me to turn around, to face away from class, away from the men who wait in line, standing at attention. He tells me to face the board.

On the board, Marcus has written HEGEMONY.

He tells me to say it out aloud, over and over and over, until the word means nothing, until the word just is. As I do so, he instructs the men to take me. One by one. Two by two. And I’m happy to share myself for my master. If that’s what he wants.

Marcus is talking about the unknowable limits of female desire and I think I understand what he means.

I’m sitting in class and I don’t know who I am, what’s come over me or why.

I’m sitting in the front row, as always.

Dressed for Marcus, as always.

But everything else has changed.

I’ve changed.

Marcus is leaning against his desk talking about erotic hallucinations and the capacity of the human mind to process fervent emotional states into phantasmagoric experiences that feel completely and utterly real, indistinguishable from reality itself.

I’m convinced Marcus is talking about me.

He’s talking to me. And only to me.

How does he know?

Marcus is talking about how film can act as a direct portal to the subconscious. How art can stir our unconscious thoughts and desires, often in ways that seem as fantastic and unreal as art itself. How, in extreme cases, our reactions to art can stimulate physical symptoms. Like the way teenage girls used to lose control of their bowels in the presence of the Beatles. Or how in the thirties they used to say that at the end of a Valentino movie there wasn’t a dry seat left in the house.

He’s talking about Stendhal Syndrome, an actual documented phenomenon whereby people experience high anxiety, fainting and even mild psychosis in the presence of great works of art.

Stendhal Syndrome. Sounds like the kind of thing a chronic hypochondriac would come up with if they were to look up ‘art’ and ‘psychosis’. The way chronic hypochondriacs always look up their symptoms, intentionally fuzzy on the details, in the hope of diagnosing some atrocious, incurable malady – the worse it is, the better to calm their anxiety. Stendhal Syndrome almost sounds as bad as it gets.

And here was I thinking it was just the name of a movie. A horror movie by Dario Argento that I once saw and never forgot – The Stendhal Syndrome – about a young female cop, played by Dario’s daughter, Asia, who while investigating a series of brutal murders, chases her prey into an art gallery and is stopped dead in her tracks by the majesty of the works she finds herself confronted by. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus , Caravaggio’s Medusa ; one work of divine beauty, another of sheer terror.

And she is transfixed. Her field of vision telescopes in, towards the painting, until she can see nothing else. Until she finds herself, not looking in from the outside, but inside the painting looking out.

Like Alice through the looking glass.

I wonder if this movie holds the key to what I’m experiencing. And I realize how silly that sounds, as if anyone looks for answers in a horror movie. Or any movie at all, if it comes to that. As if art is capable of doing anything except raising more questions.

I have so many questions and I don’t know which way to turn. But I do know who to ask.

I corner Anna after class and we go to the cafeteria. Lunch is over and it’s almost empty. We sit at a table that’s far away from everyone else. I want to tell her everything, but I know if I do, it’ll sound insane, like the ravings of a lunatic.

Instead, I tell her I’ve been having these really intense dreams.

‘About Marcus,’ she says.

Not a question, a statement. How could she know?

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘About Marcus.’

Anna claps her hands together and giggles, giddy as a child at Christmas.

‘I want to hear all the juicy details,’ she says. ‘Don’t leave anything out.’

‘Have you ever felt so turned on that you thought you were going insane? That you were losing your grip on reality and might never get it back?’

‘In my dreams?’ Anna asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Or any time.’

‘In reality,’ she says.

I nod.

Without saying a word, she draws up a large hinged silver bangle decorated with ornate swirls that hangs down on her left wrist. Underneath it, there is a ring of deep patterned livid bruises, like a fossilized imprint woven into her skin, almost as if the pattern on the bangle has been branded onto her wrist.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ she says, tracing her fingers lightly across the grooves, as if in a trance.

It looks grotesque. And painful.

She has such pretty, delicate wrists. They look swollen and deformed.

‘What happened?’ And I try not to sound shocked, but it’s hard not to.

‘They tied me up,’ she says, as if it’s the most obvious answer in the world. As if she expects me to know.

‘Who’s they?’

And Anna tells me everything. She tells me all of her unbidden secrets. She tells me things about her that I’d never have guessed.

She tells me about the website she models for.

‘It pays really well,’ she says. ‘All my tuition, all my bills.’

The reason why the money’s so good, she says, is because the site ‘caters to a very select group of people’.

‘What kind of people?’

‘People who know what they like,’ she says. ‘People who want to see a particular type of girl in specific kinds of situations. Pretty, willing young girls restrained, tied, chained, disciplined and kept.’

I try to imagine who those people are, what they do and why they would want to see something like that. I look at Anna’s wrists and imagine what she could possibly get out of it, other than severe bruising.

I wonder if she self‑harms, or if she used to, like the cutters I knew at high school. Those weird intense loner girls from good families who were so screwed up about their bodies and everything else that they harm themselves even further, beyond repair, inside and out.

And I wonder if this is what cutters do when they outgrow their teenage obsessions and move on to adult ones. I can’t imagine any other reasons why someone would submit themselves to that. For all the college tuition in the world.

‘It’s not about the money,’ Anna says, almost as an afterthought, as if she heard what I was thinking. And I almost believe her.

I look at her wrist again and then notice two large yellowing bruises on her upper arm. She’s wearing a sleeveless blouse, so she couldn’t hide them even if she wanted to. And I don’t think she does.

Did those come from the same place, I say.

‘These?’ she says, stroking them lovingly with her index finger.

‘No,’ she smiles, as if recalling some pleasant memory. ‘Fuck bruises. You know?’

I don’t, but I can probably make an educated guess.

Anna tells me she has a boyfriend. Actually, she tells me she has many boyfriends, other than Marcus, and they all provide something different, they all satisfy a different part of her. But this one guy, he likes to treat her rough and leave his mark for others to know where he’s been. And that’s fine with her too.

‘I love to feel them on my body,’ she says. ‘As long as I can see them and feel them, I remember how they got there. I remember how he put his hands on me. How he fucked me. And I like to watch them fade. From red to black to green to gold. And when they fade away to nothing, I know it’s time to hook up with him again.’

Out of all her boyfriends, she thinks she likes him the best of all, because he’s the only one who thinks the way that she thinks. Who believes, like her, that ‘sex and violence are two sides of the same coin’ – who not only believes it, but acts upon it.

‘You know how at school they tell you they’re going to teach you about the birds and the bees?’ Anna says. ‘Well, they don’t tell you everything, not the whole truth. They only tell you part of it. Only the stuff they want you to know. About the birds. All the fairytale stuff about courtship and mating rituals and raising children. They don’t tell you about the bees.’

‘Sure they do,’ I say. ‘They tell you how bees go from flower to flower and spread the pollen.’

Anna shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

‘So it should be the birds and flowers then,’ she says. ‘Not the birds and the bees. Do you know how bees fuck?’

‘I guess I don’t,’ I say. I don’t think I ever even thought about it.

‘It’s violent,’ she says. ‘Really violent.’

When bees fuck, Anna tells me, it’s like rough sex but the boy bee gets the hard end of the bargain, not the girl.

‘When he puts his penis in the queen, it turns inside out,’ she says. ‘And when he comes it’s like a firework going off. It’s so explosive that it rips his cock off and sends him flying. And a few hours later, he dies from the trauma.

‘If a guy ever hits on me too hard, or he’s being a pain in the ass, or I’m just not into him, I always tell him about the birds and the bees,’ she laughs. ‘They never ever know about the bees. And, afterwards, they wish they never did.’

She giggles.

‘One fuck and it’s all over,’ she marvels. ‘If it was like that for guys, think how different the world would be? And if we learnt about the bees at school, and not just the birds and the flowers, think what kind of sex we’d want to have later on.’

Listening to Anna talk about sex makes me feel like a virgin all over again. No, that’s not right. She makes me feel like I did on my first day at elementary school, freshly graduated from kindergarten, so proud and thinking I was an adult now – the way you do as a kid every time something significant happens, like attending a new school or getting your first bike – when I really knew nothing. Nothing at all.

That’s what I feel like now. Like I’ve been playing doctors and nurses all this time and I’ve only just worked out how sex works in the real world. I’m trying to digest all this information, but Anna hasn’t finished yet.

She says she remembers why she started telling me about the bees. That when the boy bee dies, its castrated penis stays stuck half‑in and half‑out of the queen’s vagina, like a cork in a half‑drunk bottle of wine, as a cue for other boy bees to impregnate her – like a mating sign.

‘That’s what these are,’ Anna says, as she rubs her hand slowly over the bruises on her arm again. She wears them like a temporary tattoo because she wants everyone to know what she’s into – the way people wear badges of their favorite bands on the lapels of their jacket – so others who are into the same thing will recognize and respond.

‘And if they don’t?’ I say.

‘I guess they just figure I’m really clumsy,’ she shrugs.

I’m looking at Anna, at her bruises, and I see her in a completely different light now. But she hasn’t answered any of my questions. Just left me with a whole set of new ones.

I’m thinking about everything’s Anna told me about Marcus, herself, and the birds and the bees. About fuck bruises. And I want to know what it’s like to feel Jack on my body. Not just his come. His mark. I want to know if that’s what’s missing from our sex life. Rough sex.

Jack is fucking me in bed. He’s sitting on his haunches with my legs resting against his chest and my feet over his left shoulder. He’s holding my ankles and fucking me like he’s playing the cello. His cock is sawing back and forth in my pussy. His balls are slapping against my ass cheeks, and his hand is spread across my lower belly and down into my crotch, his thumb plucking at the hood and button of my clit. He’s running through all the scales, pushing my passion up by octaves and I’m singing for him.

I’m singing for him and I decide I want to hit a higher note.

I say, ‘Hit me, Jack. I want you to hit me. Hit me hard enough to make me scream.’

I say it on the spur of the moment, and because I’m feeling good and I like the idea. But it doesn’t quite work out that way.

He stops mid‑thrust.

‘What?’ he says.

‘I want you to hit me, I want you to hurt me.’

He pulls out and sits at the end of the bed, just looking at me.

It’s dark and I can’t see his expression clearly, but I know it’s not good.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.

There’s a long silence.

‘What did you say that for,’ Jack says. ‘Why would you even ask me to do something like that to you?’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… I thought… ’

And I give up, because I can’t really think of any good reason why. It wasn’t something I planned, it’s something I felt and acted upon. So I don’t have an easy answer for him. I don’t have any answer at all.

‘Even if I did it, I couldn’t pretend to like it,’ he says. ‘I can’t pretend I even want to do it. I just don’t. Why would I want to hurt you.’

And I can hear in his voice that he’s not just upset and puzzled, he’s angry and fuming.

He gets into bed, all the way over on the edge of his side, and wraps the covers around him.

I’m left feeling frustrated, unsatisfied and deeply confused. I feel clumsy and dumb, so dumb, to even think that Jack would be into it.

We’re lying in bed. Together, but so remote, as if there’s a wall between us.

I start to hear Jack’s breathing getting heavy, but I can’t sleep.

I go into the living room, sit on the couch with my laptop, in the dark, and find the porn website Anna works for. I’ve been thinking about it all day, ever since she told me, and I want to see for myself how those marks got on her wrists and what she does.

I’m going to hold up my hand here and admit something embarrassing. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with internet porn. Porn movies, yes. Internet porn, no – two different beasts. And, yes, I do know it’s almost as impossible to avoid, but it’s just never been my thing. Maybe Kinsey was onto something after all with his little theory about women and visual stimuli.

When I think of internet porn, I think of video games, Star Wars figures, Marvel comics and science fiction, and all the things that geeky virgin teenage boys develop obsessions with as a cover for their one overriding obsession:

Jerking off to search terms on Google Images.

I think of geeky adult men who never outgrow their obsessions, just upgrade them. From toy cars to real cars, action figures to pussy‑in‑a‑can. From Google Images to YouPorn.

I think of all the billions of guys, in every country of the world, who are jerking off to internet porn at the same time. Or maybe not even internet porn. Maybe just Kim Kardashian’s website. Jerking off over badly retouched and barely titillating photos of the Kardashian sisters. I think of all the billions of men ejaculating gazillions of spermatozoa simultaneously over images of Kim Kardashian’s digital ass.

I think, what a waste of good sperm.

What a waste of precious energy.

If only someone invented a way of tapping that energy at source. Or found a way to turn the billions of come‑stiffened Kleenex tissues discarded daily into a source of fuel. If someone discovered how to do that, most of the world’s energy problems would be solved in a snap. No more wars for oil. No more carbon footprints. No more nuclear waste.

No more wasted tax dollars needlessly spent trying to achieve cold fusion.

Just billions of hot, sweaty guys sitting in front of their computer monitors with their pants around their ankles, furiously jerking themselves off over internet porn and Kim Kardashian’s ass, day and night, night and day.

Without ever feeling guilty.

So I guess what I’m saying is this, when it comes to internet porn, I’m on the fence. Not a user myself, but I can definitely see the potential benefits for everlasting world peace.

But this porn site, Anna’s site, even with my limited experience of the genre, must be the strangest porn site I’ve ever seen. Starting with the name.

Sodom.

Or rather, SODOM, all caps. Because the last thing anyone requires from pornography is subtlety.

Sodom. And not Gomorrah. Not because it’s too subtle, but probably because it’s too hard to spell and sounds like an STD. Because pornography and STDs, well, let’s just say they’re never going to be the best of friends.

So, SODOM. An acronym of sorts. For the words splashed across the home page, also in caps.

SODALITY OF DOMINANTS.

Whatever that means.

I’m looking at this website and I can’t make head or tail of it. This isn’t pornography as I know it or understand it. For a start, there’s no sex on display. None at all. At least, none that I can see. Just a gallery and a search engine.

I don’t know what to search for and afraid of what I might find if I do. I scan through the gallery instead. An endless scrolling collection of girls, in portraits that look like yearbook photos, all exceptionally pretty, almost every one college‑age. I scan through the gallery looking for Anna, half‑expecting to recognize someone else I know too.

I wonder how many girls there are like Anna who pay their way through college like this, in porn. If I’m the only college‑age female who doesn’t. I wonder why pretty girls, whose looks give them such a natural advantage in life, choose to turn what they have to their disadvantage.

I think of Séverine. Who had everything, wanted for nothing, and how that wasn’t enough. Séverine, who, more than anything, wanted to be nothing.

I think of Anna. And then I see her.

I click on her picture. It brings up another gallery. All of Anna’s scenes, each one illustrated by a thumbnail. I scroll through them. There’s a lot, too many to count. And the thumbnails, they look like minutely detailed tableaus of medieval torture from an illuminated manuscript.

The movie clips don’t have titles. Anna doesn’t have a name, not even a porn name. She’s been reduced to a number – a generic ten digit number. It feels like I’m flicking through a Sears catalog of sexual aberration and torture or that I’ve clicked open a window into Pandora’s Box. I wish I’d never seen it because now I can never un‑see it.

Where should I start?

How about the drilldo? Seems as good a place as any. The first clip I click on features Anna, a toilet and a drilldo. If you don’t know what a drilldo is, I’ll tell you.

It’s exactly what it sounds like. A drill with a dildo where the tip should be.

The next question is, how does it work?

And the answer to that is, do you really have to ask?

Ever had to drill holes in the wall to put up a set of shelves?

Then you already you know that once it gets going, an electric drill will slice through plaster like butter. And it will keep going until it hits that outer wall of concrete and stone. Then it starts to shake the shit out of you. You set it to ‘hammer’, hoping to chisel away a little further and, when it hits stone again, your drill has a kick like a .45.

Now, imagine putting that inside you.

I’ll stop there for a second to let that sink in.

An ordinary household electric drill, put to uses its manufacturer never intended, never even considered as part of its recommended usage. A power tool turned into a sex toy.

Not just any sex toy.

The .45 Magnum of sex toys.

Call me naive but I had no idea such a thing existed. I had no idea vibrator technology had advanced to the degree that the battery‑powered rabbit was now as outmoded as the Sony Walkman. That vibrator technology had evolved into the realms of body horror, dragging female sexuality kicking and screaming along with it.

Two thousand years of culture and seven ages of man, all leading up to the moment when some genius came up with the idea of combining a dildo and a power drill. As if that’s exactly what the world was waiting for, a sex toy that can punish the insides of a woman to orgasm at twenty‑four hundred revolutions per minute.

Not just any sex toy.

The Maserati of sex toys.

Built for women, but designed – and could only have been designed – by man. As if women haven’t already been punished and tortured enough by the designs of man. Someone had to invent the drilldo. Now imagine watching this thing punish the insides of your new best friend.

I’m looking at Anna tied to a toilet, on a concrete plinth in the middle of a large, dark, dank, dirty, creepy warehouse. There’s no set‑up for the clip, no explanation, no plot, no dialogue. Other than Anna you never see a single other person. No shadows lurking in the background. No voices off‑camera. It’s as if she has been abducted, locked up and left there. And maybe that’s the point. Anna told me that the site had a specific audience and now I understand why she said it. The movies are edited so that you can see only what whoever made them wants you to see.

When Anna told me what she did, when I saw the welts and bruises on her wrists, it unnerved me. But my first instinct when confronted with this is to laugh. It looks so silly. But also strangely beautiful.

Anna’s soft, pale, ruddied flesh is set against the hard white enamel of the toilet. She’s slouching against the toilet, head and shoulders against the cistern, lower back resting against the seat, her legs extended vertically, in a v‑shape, held by ropes tied around her ankles, like the strings that hold up a marionette, so her pussy and ass are on show. Ropes above and below her breasts reach behind and around her, anchoring her to the bowl like a hat strapped to a lady race‑goer at the Kentucky Derby.

She looks like the kind of thing Marcel Duchamp might have come up with if he’d only ventured into porn.

A woman tied to a toilet.

Every plumber’s fantasy.

The drilldo.

Joe the electrician’s favorite tool.

Put them together and what have you got?

The ultimate in handyman porn.

And this drilldo, it’s pounding away at Anna’s pussy like a jackhammer and her eyes have rolled into the back of her head. Her body is trembling the way your hand trembles when you’re holding an electric drill. Her whole body. Like she’s strapped to a chair in a wind tunnel.

And she’s screaming. The way you scream when the car of the roller coaster tips over that first big curve and all you can see is that long drop racing towards you. A scream of pure pleasure and sheer inexhaustible terror. But her scream doesn’t stop, it just merges into the remorseless electric roar of the drilldo.

I have the volume turned all the way down, but somehow it still doesn’t seem low enough. Because a scream sounds piercing at any volume. I’m scared to turn off the sound because I’m certain that, without it, everything will just look ten times worse.

I glance at the bedroom door.

I really hope Jack’s asleep.

I’m trying to imagine why any woman would want to submit to that. I ask myself why Anna would want to submit to that. And the answer is right there in front of me.

Her eyes have glazed over. There’s a strange kind of ecstasy written on her face. A look that says, ‘gimme more’ and ‘no more’. Both. At the same time. A look beyond the limits of endurance. A look I’ll never forget. I can’t stop looking. I’m afraid to look away. I don’t know whether I want to fuck Anna or save her.

I don’t hear the bedroom door until it’s open.

Until it’s too late and Jack’s standing there, naked and rubbing sleep out of his eyes.

I stab at the keyboard, frantically.

Turn off the volume.

‘What time is it?’ Jack says, sleepy‑voiced. He’s woozy, but still a little sour.

‘You frightened me,’ I say.

Did he hear?

Hide the browser.

I’m flushed with the fear of being discovered. Paranoid it shows on my face.

Pull up the word processor.

‘What are you doing?’ he says.

He heard. He knows. He suspects.

‘Essay,’ I say, and sigh, just a little too dramatically.

No more questions. Please, no more questions. I’m not good at this. The guilt thing.

He goes to get himself a glass of water in the kitchen, and walks back through the living room.

‘Don’t stay up too long,’ he says, standing above me, looking down.

‘Soon,’ I say.

He doesn’t know, he didn’t hear. I can hear it in his voice now. I feel stupid.

The guilt of doing wrong replaced by the guilt of being dumb.

And then I’m distracted by his cock. Right at eye level. Early morning cock, fat and fleshy. His balls hanging full and low. Sometimes I think I could tell the time of day by the shape and size of his cock at any given moment, like the shadows on a sundial that lengthen and recede. I know if I could put Jack’s cock in my mouth now, I could suck all the disappointment out of him and make him forget anything happened between us at all.

He goes back to the bedroom and closes the door behind him. I wait to make sure he’s not going to come out again. I wait as long as I can. I wait thirty wasted seconds staring at the blank page of an essay I have no intention of writing. Then I pull up the SODOM website and start again.

I’m looking at Anna in an iron cage that’s been cast in shape of a dog, standing on all fours. It fits the curves of her body so snugly it seems like it was custom‑made. Only her rear‑end and her head are not encased by metal.

From what I can tell, the whole cage is electrified because there are cables connected to it that trail off, out of shot, and every time Anna knocks against the bars, even slightly, she howls in pain. Just like a dog is supposed to.

The clip is shot so it never cuts, just tracks around and around and around Anna, ever so slowly, just so you can soak in all the details.

It tracks past Anna’s rear‑end and I can’t help but notice her labia squeezed plump between her thighs, entirely and expertly shaved, with not a razor bump or burn in sight, but coated with thin beads of sweat. She’s completely smooth and hairless, except for a neatly trimmed bush, dirty‑blonde and downy, in the shape of a rabbit’s foot.

Sticking out her ass is a large, shiny aluminum butt‑plug that looks like an H‑bomb. And sticking out of that are several black cables that are clamped to the bars of the cage.

The lips of Anna’s pussy are held apart by metal clips. They look like bulldog clips, but they have screws in the top with copper wire around them, which hangs slack, all the way down to the terminals of a car battery placed nearby on the floor. It is jury‑rigged with dials so that the juice can be turned up and down.

I figure it must have been done for effect because even I know it’s pretty hard to get an electric shock from a car battery. A mild buzz, maybe, but nothing lethal. Even so, there are more electrical cables clustered around Anna’s nether region than the backside of an office mainframe. And it makes me nervous.

It’s as if this Anna, the one I’m watching, is a different person. Not the Anna who sits behind me in class. Not even the one who pulled up her sleeves and showed me the deep welts and livid bruises on her wrists and arms.

This Anna deliberately puts herself in harm’s way. Not knowing exactly what she’s getting into or how she’ll react. Whether she can take it or if it will break her.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 658