Novel

CHAPTER SIX

     There was the sense that she had awaken between fractions of time, as if a black hole had spit her violently from the ether into a moment unfolding. It was not a surprise at first that she should find herself in a strange bed, in an unfamiliar room, looking at Joie--until the sense that she had been absent from her own life choked her with alarm.
     "Where are we?" she asked and tried to sit up. The muscles in her neck and back resisted, each protesting with an acute counter-resistance. "How long have I been asleep? How did I get here?"
     Joie answered the questions while straightening the comforter on the bed, being careful not to meet Laine's eyes. "We're at my house. You've been asleep for about eighteen hours," she said and sat down again. "And my friend Mel brought you here."
     "Mel?" Laine repeated. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt her forehead wrinkle in frustration. The harder she tried to remember the blank parts, the darker and further away they got. Her mind scrambled to find a picture of the events that led her to Joie's bedroom, but a headache formed suddenly and she withdrew the attempt to acknowledge the pain. "I don't remember, Joie," she said and rubbed her temples. "I don't remember a damn thing. I think I remember being at Babylon...I remember having a drink with a woman."
     "Kelly," Joie answered.
     "Kelly?"
     "Yeah, the woman you were drinking with...her name's Kelly."
     "Is she a friend of yours?"
     Joie finally looked her in the eye. "Kelly is nobody's friend."
     Laine swallowed and looked away. A memory surfaced and approached her consciousness like a dark knight on an evil horse, and she closed her eyes against the galloping.
     A phone rang in another room and while Joie answered it, Laine tried to piece together the events backward. She remembered drinking, but had she consumed so much alcohol that it resulted in a blackout? She had been drinking a warm, amber liquid. She could see it sparkling in the glass, could smell the musky tonic as if it had burned its memory into her lips. She could see her hand holding the drink, see herself smiling into the bemused face of her companion. She remembered standing at the bar and being approached by the woman seconds after she had sat down, as if the woman had been hiding somewhere in the shadows, waiting for whomever picked that particular seat.
     Joie returned with a large glass of water and aspirin. She handed both to Laine and sat down next to the bed. Joie's silence became apparent as she swallowed the medicine and a feeling of dread clutched at her, like an old friend about to deliver shocking news.
     "Joie, what happened to me?" she asked and held her breath.
     "I'm gonna let Mel tell you when she gets here. That was her on the phone, checking on you again."
     "Again?" Laine smiled and felt a slight burn in her bottom lip. She touched a finger to her mouth and frowned. "Did I bite my lip?" she asked.
     Joie looked away quickly.
     Laine got out of bed and steadied herself against the dresser. She braced herself for a fall as her equilibrium launched a dizzying attack against her gait. She utilized furniture in the room to assist her to the mirror next to the door, where she stood for several seconds without faltering, amazed how shock could immediately appease all such handicaps.
     Her bottom lip had been sliced open from the corner of her mouth to the center. Dried blood had dotted the surface as if she had hastily applied an old lipstick without bothering to check for consistency. There was a large bruise on the right side of her face, from high on the cheekbone to just below her jaw bone. Her right eye, which she was surprised to discover was swollen shut, had suddenly begun to throb with a steady, aching pain she had not noticed before. She touched it tenderly, more amazed at its appearance than its source. "This is my first black eye," she said.
     "Laine..." Joie began.
     "Oh, god," she answered and made her way back to bed. The blackness of the details covered her mind like sludge, bubbling like a toxin more vile than the events buried beneath it. As much as she wanted to know the truth, she was petrified to hear it, as if the very details would become who she was, would reshape her as a person defined by what had been done to her.
     The doorbell rang and Joie went to answer it. Laine could hear Mel asking about her in the other room, followed by whispers and Mel's voice, strangulated by a voice tense with outrage.
     But she was smiling when she entered the room. "Hey lady," she said lightly, closing the door behind her. "How ya feeling?"
     Laine only stared at her and waited.
     Mel finally looked at her and swallowed. "Laine, you got roofied. You were given a drug called Rophinol. You might've heard of it by another name...by it's street name," she said and shifted in her seat.
     When she didn't continue, Laine swallowed. "What is the street name?"
     Mel hesitated and retied her shoe.
     "Mel, what is it called?"
     "It's called the date-rape drug, Laine."
     She wasn't sure she had heard correctly. "The date rape drug?"
     "Yeah. Some people call it a 'trip and fall' or a 'mind eraser.' People use it on women to impair them so they can't resist a sexual assault."
     Laine felt she could see between the molecules floating within the two foot space between them. Mel's words floated through the atmosphere like tiny colored dots, losing meaning and shape for the incredible significance they contained. As much as she wanted to look away, she felt compelled to watch the dots take shape and form one of the most sinister thoughts in her mind she had ever experienced. "But this was a wom..."
     "A woman, Laine? And you think women are incapable of such motivations?"
     She had thought women incapable of enjoying anything which men might do without thinking. The throbbing behind her eyes beat into her brain like a gong. With each blink, she winced against the echoing base of this reality as if the sound alone were enough to destroy her. "I can't remember anything."
     "And you won't," Mel said and sighed. "You'll never get that back. And it's probably a good thing," she added.
     "What happened?"
     "Are you sure you want to know?"
     She nodded and held her breath, afraid that the details would be delayed for even one moment longer. As much as she feared the truth, not knowing was worse.
     "You were at Babylon when Kelly picked you up. I asked the bartender at the back bar how long the two of you had been there and she wasn't sure. She said you were both there when she got to work. Had she been there when you came in, she would've known you had been drugged."
     "How?"
     "Time," Mel said and reached for Laine's hand. "Roofies work very fast. Getting drunk takes a little longer. They both look alike, but time is what usually gives it away. Stumbling out the door a half hour after you hit the bar was the defining factor."
     "How did anyone know how long I'd been there?" Laine felt as if she were questioning the actions and motivations of another self, an extension of herself that might've gotten away and taken on a life of its own.
     "The chick at the door clocked you coming in about forty minutes before Sue saw you leaving."
     Laine was quiet, her careful breathing measured out shallowly as if she feared it might all be trying to escape at once, unable to meet the demand of supplying such an expansive emptiness. "She raped me?" she whispered and looked at Mel through tears. "Did she rape me?"
     Mel shook her head. "I don't think it got that far, Laine."
     "How could you not? Look at my face. Look at my...amnesia. How could you not think that woman ripped into me with whatever women use to..." She could not even imagine the violence of that desire, something angry enough to tear into the essence of their communion...something that welled up inside a likened spirit only so that it would dine on the sensibilities of sameness, to fuel a hunger so ravenous that it would eat its own. The thought of such incest biled in her throat and she clenched her teeth together.
     "I was there, Laine. I saw what happened."
     She couldn't breathe. "You were there?"
     "She brought you to a club called The Crop. I was there. I saw the two of you walk in."
     "What is this club?" Laine asked, her forehead wrinkled with confusion.
     "It's a club for BDSM."
     "BD...?"
     "Bondage, Detainment, Sadism and Masochism."
     They didn't speak. Laine tried to digest the words slowly, letting the taste of the words burn into her throat like acid. "S and M."
     "Yes," Mel said.
     "There are clubs where people go?"
     "Yes."
     "Where people go to inflict pain..."
     "Or to receive it."
     Laine shook her head slowly. "They rape women there?"
     "No, Laine," Mel said and pulled her chair closer to the bed. "Listen princess, I'm about to give you a crash course in a subculture that most people never hear about, most people never see. The reality of it is not near what some people imagine it to be. There are rules. There are very strict rules that are followed to the letter by most people involved in this life, and these rules are inviolable. But some people don't play by the rules, people like Kelly."
     "Tell me."
     "Kelly is a member of the leather community. She's a Domme. It's hard to explain to any great degree, Laine, and what I might define as a Domme might conflict with what someone else's definition was of the same thing. It's very personal, just as pain is very personal. But in essence, a Domme is someone who has power and control over a submissive, or a 'subbie.' This is a dynamic referred to as a power exchange. A Domme doesn't take power. She is given power. A submissive is not someone who has no power or control, but someone who has given power and control to a Domme. This exchange comes with rules, safety words, parameters of play, contracts..."
     "Safety words?"
     "Yes, a word that stops the play when the submissive uses it."
     "Okay, but wouldn't that give the submissive all the power, if she determines how far things will go or when it will stop?"
     "Exactly. In a perfect BDSM world, the submissive ultimately has the control," Mel said and sighed again. "Unfortunately, no society is perfect..."
     Laine clenched her fists around the sheets and held her breath.
     "There are some submissives, some might call them slaves, that have no safety words. They give total power to a Domme and will seldom stop the play even when they are bleeding, even when they are exhausted or injured...even when they are dying. It is extremely crucial for the safety of these subbies to have a Domme who understands the extent of this submission. But then, there are some Dommes who seek out these particular subbies because there are no limits..."
     "Like Kelly?" Laine guessed.
     "Like Kelly, yes."
     "But why would she have gone for me? I'm not in this life. I'm not a subbie."
     Mel smiled. "That's where you're quite wrong, Laine."
     Tears leapt from Laine's eyes as if emotion were trying to escape in a torrent of panic and disbelief. She sat paralyzed with the realization that her powerlessness had been read by a complete stranger amid the noise and confusion of a crowded bar, in dim light, out from under the disguise of a well-dressed confident woman wearing brand new leather boots. Her complete submission to life had shone out like a thousand beams of infrared light, pinpointing the exact location of her tender, perpetual acquiescence.
     "What happened after we came in?" Laine asked, prepared to hear anything, braced for the impact of any ugliness which she had yet to imagine.
     Mel smiled broadly. "I stopped you both at the bar and bought her a drink. And then I told her you were mine."
     "You told her I was yours?" Laine asked.
     "Yeah."
     "You told her we were a couple?"
     Mel laughed. "No."
     "You told her we were seeing each other?"
     "No."
     "What did you..."
     "I told her I owned you."
     Laine's mouth fell open and she blinked. "What?"
     Mel sat quietly for a few moments and waited.
     "You're a Domme, too?"
     "Yes."
     "You pick up women..."
     "No, I have a submissive. Most Dommes at the club have a submissive. There are very few like Kelly. Most of us are proud of and maintain the integrity of our responsibilities to our submissives and no one that I associate with would ever drug or otherwise impair anyone for play. Most of us, in fact, don't engage in drugs or alcohol use during play, nor do we allow our submissives to do so either. Safety is absolutely utmost, and anything that interferes with that, interferes with our effectiveness, is not tolerated."
     "Then why is Kelly allowed to? Why is that tolerated?"
     "It's not, Laine. We've been watching her for a while and we've tried a number of things to have her ex-communicated. But she is a powerful Domme with a long-standing reputation in this community. She has a lot of money, she has a lot of powerful connections and she's very intelligent and resourceful."
     "But what she did to me...isn't that illegal?"
     "It is illegal. It is morally...Jesus. We can't prove anything. Had this turned out at all differently, you would've been taken to a hospital and we might've been able to get proof that you were drugged. But with your situation, I wanted to give you the opportunity to decide how far to push this. She beat you, Laine, but I don't think she raped you. She would've done that at the club under the guise of play. You are still within your rights to take this to the police and have it investigated."
     "I could prove I was drugged. It's probably still in my system."
     "Yes, you could. But could you prove it was she who drugged you?"
     "I was with her!" she shouted.
     "But you could've already been impaired when she met up with you. Nobody at Babylon can say otherwise. And you could've approached her. She will certainly maintain that you did."
     "She's done this lots of times, hasn't she?"
     Mel nodded.
     "Why doesn't someone stop her?"
     "We're trying."
     "Why is it so hard?"
     "Because her father is Chief of Police? That could be it. Her brother is the District Attorney? That could be why."
     "I'm suddenly very tired," Laine said and sat up.
     "Where are you going?"
     "I'm going home," she said standing. "I'm going home."
     "I'll give you a ride, sweetie. You're in no condition to drive."
     "I'm going home to Michael, Mel."
     "Wait," Mel said.
     "No."
     In the livingroom, she hugged Joie hard, holding on for longer than she had ever held a hug before. Despite the trauma of her molestation, she could not help notice how elegant Joie's home was, acknowledging with feminine appreciation the shades of creams and mauves that intermingled there. "I love you," she whispered. "I love you, Joie."
     "Laine, you don't have to go back. You can stay here."
     "I have to go back," she said and walked deliberately out the front door. She felt a need to remove herself from the scene of such a confession, as if space were needed to mute the details.
     Outside she realized she had no way to get home and stood on the sidewalk in a trance.
     She realized she had no home.
     She wanted her son.
     She could feel herself shrinking under the open sky. She could feel her smallness on a street which gave way to neighborhood, which panned into block into town and city. She saw herself insignificant to a state, feeding nothing into country, divided between hemispheric borders, perforated from land and earth, until she was nothing against the backdrop of atmospheric immensity. She imagined her life's camera backing away and panning out against the stage of her world, centered on her tiny shape, pulling back further to dot her against the earth's enormous promise, further still into the ether of space, where her outline was of such miniscule proportions, she was but a dot of insignificant substance, neither taking shape nor contributing to the overall picture.
     Her vision became so acutely pinpoint that her hands, held in front of her, were the shapeless representation of molecules of skin, an epidermic conflagration of cells and nerves, pieced together to encompass a system of meaningless bones and tendons and capillaries. "I am nothing but a physiological depiction of life. My life is nothing but the systems which are required to sustain it."
     She began to run. There was no path. There was no road or direction. There was only one foot hitting pavement after the other, running towards nothing. She ran towards her conscious high, seeking the warmth and emotional sedation of its condition like an alcoholic towards liquor. She felt her mouth water, felt every cellular process spreading open to receive its fix, arching its center for the fill. She ran until her muscles stretched beyond ache, worked through the torture, and salivated for the pain, begging for more.
     She ran towards her own power. She sprinted towards a new order, a place as unfamiliar to her as any place she had ever stood. She knew she was lost. She knew no familiar object around her. Street names meant nothing, evoked no memory or meaning. But she found herself content with the misdirection, as if being lost on unfamiliar ground made her more aware of where she was. She had no expectations of discovery. She had no apprehension of finding something familiar. She was lost upon foreign ground and it was where she was supposed to be.
     By the time her body gave in, she found herself in a town about two miles from Joie's house, and about twenty minutes in the center of her apartment and her husband's house in both direction. She smiled at the irony while she stood bent double, gasping her breath back in as if apologizing for pushing it out in the first place.
     She noted that she had just jogged two miles in her new leather boots. She would throw them out. She would throw out the clothes she wore, wash the filth of the night's felony from her body. She stood up and cocked her head to the side.
     Across the street there was a large gym housing the center of the mall, taking up a few thousand square foot space, with some portions of the windows blackened out with paint. Above the store were the words MARTIAL ARTS, Tae Kwan Do and Hapkido. Intrigued, she crossed the street and stood before the large plate glass window and read the descriptions of the courses. She had never heard of Hapkido before and ran the word over her tongue several times, searching for its flavor. A small pamphlet was taped to the window, several phrases highlighted with yellow marker: Karate with shoes, most complete and street effective martial art, avoid conflict but react without hesitation in the event of a self-defense situation, develop a flexible mind and the ability to make quick and appropriate responses to hostile actions.
     Her anger washed over her like a tidal wave, suffocating the breath out of her, squeezing pressure around her heart and stopping the flow of blood to her organs. She pressed her head against the cool window and closed her eyes. In her life that moment, there was no rhyme or melody that provided any relief from her torment, there was no place where she could go that would ease her back into herself. She marched against the hardened realities of her day as if taking each task with blunt force, feeling the bruised resistance against her skin and soul. There was nothing for her now, no sound or sight or place that filled her senses with the possibilities of her own potential.
     What could life give to anyone who was engulfed with the sense of loss so profound that she could only truly know who she was when she was nothing at all? What could a self-defense course teach her about herself when she could only get what she truly wanted by giving everything away?
     She paced the distance between the gym and a pawn shop specializing in small-caliber handguns and stopped herself between them, looking from one to the other. Both offered solutions, one more permanent than the other. But the paths were so different, one an instant resolution...the other a long and agonizing introspection.
     She filled up her lungs with a deep and abiding breath, held it hard within her and closed her eyes. She suddenly remembered her psychology course in college and envisioned a pyramid, squinting into it with her mind's eyes to see the words engraved there. It was Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and she was floundering on the bottom plane amid life's basic necessities: air, water, food, safety. It was where she had lived for so long, inhaling life-sustaining components of life, just to survive.
     "It's not living," she thought to herself. "It's life, but it's not living."
     She paced again between the two stores, contemplating the simplest, most effective course of action that would lead her ultimately towards redemption. And without giving it another thought, she changed the direction, spun on her heel, opened the door and went inside.