They have been waiting here long enough to know every square inch of the place, time measured in spatial area. It isn’t a big room anyway, not all that much to know, and almost all there is to know faces them. To their backs, only bare wall, and underneath a simple wooden bench with cushions, the firm type you can’t sit on without unbalancing yourself, so they don’t, and leave the cushions to either side of their thin bodies. In front, the assistant’s desk and the door. The assistant is looking at a computer screen at an angle where they can’t see its surface. And on the assistant’s desk are the types of things you would expect to see: a mug, a pen holder, a calendar, post-it notes. Conjure up an image of an office desk in your mind, mentally overlay it with this, and it’s very likely there won’t be enough difference between the two to cause any kind of dissonance worth mentioning. Hardly any at all.
In the far wall is embedded the door, which is flanked by two abstract paintings, one of which is remarkable in that it looks both like a piece of fruit and a human head. The other one doesn’t really look like anything, but if you stare at it long enough the central shapes seem to separate themselves from the periphery to give a kind of three-dimensional effect that is unexpected. They both wonder separately if that’s supposed to happen or if it’s just them.
The door is bright red and looks out of place against the green wall in which it’s set. There’s again that 3D effect that mirrors that of the abstract picture: the door’s incongruent shade is in such dramatic contrast to its background that it seems to pop out as if it’s always open, as if you could step around its surface and enter to its side. Ironically, whenever it does open, and its back is revealed to be a dull brown, the effect fades and it seems a less inviting entrance.
It opens now and our pair rise. The assistant stands next to the door holding it, her head slightly bowed in invitation—in such a position, as it happens, as to partly obscure the picture to the left, so that her head almost, but not quite, acts as a stand in for the piece of fruit that looks like a human head, making the whole effect of the painting more properly three dimensional than the illusion of its counterpart to the right. Not perfectly though, and unless you looked carefully you might not notice. Our pair don’t. They are focused on the door and walk quickly through it.
Kim and The Hypnotist
The skin, white and flickering, faintly moist in the bright light, taut around a skull in which two large sockets hold two dark orbs, irises deep and black. The skin fascinates, hums a reverberating message, plays an offbeat tune. I listen with my eyes.
I won’t bore you with her exact words because: 1) the plan as she outlines it is easily summarizable in far less space than she takes to describe it; 2) speech never reads as well written down as listened to; and 3) her linguistic exhortations lack the cool coherence of the pattern that is subtly rippling over her skin, which is what I’m most interested in, and this interest puts a faithful rendition of what she is saying beyond me. I get the gist. If you get the gist.
Her skin—a skin she shares with her twin, of whom more anon—is not anything supernatural, nor with respect to it is advanced science at work, nor are we located in a futuristic scenario, or on a different planet, or alternative universe, all of this being real and verifiable: she is sitting directly across from me now, after all, mouth moving in the formation of the plan. And the skin, apart from a thin layer of makeup, is natural in the strictest sense. You could, if you were a close observer of human nature, find such skin in any banal place in any weather, or on any occasion anywhere if you happen to bump into one of the few people who share this characteristic pallor. If you were looking. If you were really looking.
Adjectives slow us down, so to get them out of the way: flat, sickly, pale, light, sticky, matte with a touch of sheen (a paint company might patent the effect for a niche product or household part). And so on. But for the most part more of a process than a thing. Revealed in change, in action
So, not a disease to be sure, nor a simple genetic aberration—the point is personal—there is something underneath which plays itself out on the surface of a certain type, and if given enough free reign inscribes itself on their very skin. As if, if we look closely enough, we can see every thought settle there the moment it arises. And so settle the thoughts of this plan softly over Kim as she imparts it, and I watch her moving without moving, or moving on the surface, as the ocean does, ever-changing and ever the same, her skin a motile rather than a static presence, not simply something on which there is movement or underneath which there is movement, or a biological addendum to a part that moves, but a moving independence, that yet maintains the coherence of her as subject moving in tandem with that of which she is composed.
And now, in one of only a few vocal pauses in which she purposely moves anything other than her over-lipsticked lips, she slowly lights a cigarette, and only then seems to see what I see, though it seems not to matter to her and the cigarette is quickly integrated into the overall sense of rippling inertia, the effect working from within to without in concert with the dim light of the cafe lamps that illuminate us.
So, the gist… But then maybe the scene at the end of the plan where the story would bring us supposing the plan were to be properly enacted (and I have at this point no reason to doubt that it will be) would be more illuminating than a bare chronological summary, which in itself would be somewhat misleading apropos Kim’s description as she is giving it now, which approaches circularly rather than linearly the point, the point which is itself the point of departure and that of arrival, that is, her sister’s sexual assault, the description of which now she spits across the table with a smoke ring punctuating its concise articulation: “Fucked”, she says, exhaling, and the ring dissipates as it rises above the orb of her right eye (provoking the thought that to complete the dramatic effect she ought to violently stub the cigarette out in the ashtray in front of her, but she doesn’t—perhaps because it would be just too perfect a gesture, and instead, she blows another ring, which hangs a little longer in the air than the last, and she stares at me in its wake for a moment as the shade of puce towards which her skin had moved as she enunciated that climactic f-bomb fades back to dull white).
So, the scene, assuming a bird’s eye view from the living room ceiling: two figures stand below us in a room in which violence has occurred. That much is obvious. The place is in disarray. The coffee table has been knocked over, a lamp lies on the ground, several books and some papers are scattered around. One of the two figures there, the female, is crying and semi-naked while the other, the male, is clothed and silent, standing over her. His stance seems less threatening than puzzled.
We zoom in.
The woman’s face enlarging before us is contorted with agony and fear, the black of her eyes smeared down the sides of her cheeks. Her lipstick, laterally displaced from the corners of her mouth, effects a bizarre smile broken by strands of wet brown hair which branch and cling over her tear-soaked skin. She can neither look at her attacker nor look away, speak nor remain silent. A raspy sound escapes her throat. It might be ‘Why?’
‘It’s over,’ the man tells her, and it’s not clear even to himself whether he means this as a question.
This is where I enter and quickly administer the injection that incapacitates the female. The male, no longer needed, I usher upstairs.
Some background at this point might aid in understanding: Kim and her sister, Donna, had an unfortunate falling out, an irreversible difference of opinion about each other’s respective merits as persons which formed a rift, which grew to a chasm, which grew to an abyss, which grew to a black hole across which neither could reach without feeling that from themselves their very identity would be torn and consumed. The source of their quarrel is not so important as the fact that from a few diseased cells in one organ of their interactions, there developed a tumour that spread its cloned darkness to every corner of their relationship. A tumor, given Kim’s proclivities, asymmetric in its potential destructivity, and if Donna had known her sister better, had been more aware of what she was capable of, she might have hated her even more than she did, but would have feigned not to, would have given in, rolled over and let the tigress gently tickle her belly rather than risk the psychic disembowelment the conflict is to about to lead to.
Kim, for her part, is not without imaginative foresight and realizes the dangers of accruing blame after any unexpected misfortune that might befall her sister (the depth of their mutual dislike being no secret amongst family and friends), and so has employed her not inconsiderable intellectual energies into assuring that Donna will be faulted for what is to follow, both in her own eyes and in others.
‘I’ve written her note to herself,’ Kim beams, and clears her throat before enunciating brightly:
Dear self, Dear Donna,
This is you and this for you and from you. You will remember none of the following, but it is all true. This, after all, is written in your own hand, which you must recognize, and as hard as it may be for you to understand the whys of it all, as fantastical and cruel as it may all seem, it is important that we come together now, we past and present selves, in the knowledge of what has happened, and create for us in unity, the life, unconventional as it is, that we have always wanted.
So, I ask you to put aside then the feelings of pain, and now, I’m sure, growing confusion, that have taken over our life and focus here clearly and coolly on what I am about to say. I am going to open a door, my dear self, and I want you to walk through it with me.
Kim continues reading, fascinated by her words, as she goes on in the letter to describe the details of the plan, now complete, from the future vantage point of the letter from ‘Donna’ to Donna.
You might wonder why anyone would choose to be friends with someone like Kim, considering what she is capable of. You might regard friendship as being based on trust and what trust could there be with one who is willing to inflict on a member of their own family the type of pain most would hesitate to inflict on even the worst of criminals? But small minds choose their friends for small reasons. Don’t misunderstand. I am not absent a conscience. I would not do what Kim can do. I am only an associate in these terms. But I choose my friends on the basis of how much they interest me. And Kim interests me.
And do I trust her? Yes and no. That’s to say, I don’t make myself vulnerable in her presence, and that’s enough for both of us. In a way, it’s a truer friendship than most—we know more of each other. We go deeper. I can’t, I admit, afford to project a naive warmth, or reveal those lighter, more humane aspects of myself, leftovers from a happy upbringing, that play still in my instincts, and make themselves known in reflexive smiles at children or dogs or anyone or thing with an innocent countenance engaged in an innocent act. That would amount to a potentially dangerous exposure. Not that Kim isn’t childlike in a certain way, but her playfulness is akin to a puppy’s with a chew toy. In order to be satisfied, she must be chewing on something or, more often, someone. And this destructive innocence expresses itself in the Catholic nature of her taste. She is not burdened with the limitations most are. She doesn’t impose on her nature anything beyond which fosters it. Which means, above all, that she so often is her nature––and not in some fake ‘New Age’, be yourself, way, but viscerally. She cannot be otherwise. And in this she is so transparent that she is opaque to those who don’t recognize her freedom. I recognize it, and to a great degree envy it yet I can’t do the things she does, only wonder at them.
Kim comes to the penultimate paragraphs:
That you are still reading my dearest is evidence of your strength and I trust that through whatever shock this letter has borne to you, your inner reserve prevails and will serve as the ground for our future flourishing.
I must leave you now in words; I am as yet only an inscription of our past and having imparted my all to you can only hope you will embrace my spirit so that in substance we can be whole again and pursue fully the life that awaits us.
With loyalty, love, and faith,
Donna
Kim looks up and makes a ta-da! gesture. I smile and order another coffee.
Incidentally, by means of a belated introduction: I am a hypnotist, or, if you like, a mentalist, an updated term with some broader connotations related to psychological knowledge and manipulation. Regardless, at the core of what I do is almost always some form of extreme influence which most would call hypnosis, and so ‘hypnotist’ is what I call myself.
Hypnosis has its limits, I should add. The source aspects of a performance are as much misdirection as psychological mystery, and misdirection, as it is used as the basis of any magic act in tandem with appropriate technologies, is enough to produce the greatest of awe, but a hypnosis act, a good one, imbues in its observers, along with wonder, something like fear, and if you can open up that space enough, you have hypnotized an audience as much as any subject you might use as the focus of your act. And so you can travel beyond the limits of the art by obscuring them.
I myself am hypnotized by her skin. She is quiet now. All is explained and agreed, and she emits a low visual murmur. Her skin purrs and rolls and her eyes look through me. I feel something like love.
The problem in life is not that we don’t understand, the problem is that we can’t unravel our understanding as we haven’t created the context into which it can be unraveled. That is what Kim does for me. She makes real that which I need to understand myself. Just as a three-dimensional object cannot express itself fully on a two dimensional plane, I am a flattened abstraction which her acts of emotional origami make whole.
Kim doesn’t dwell much on the details of the assault. Though it isn’t squeamishness that prevents such discussion much less any form of guilt. If she is capable of either of those two feelings, I have no evidence of it and plenty to the contrary. It’s the bigger picture that interests her. There’s that element of artistry about the whole thing in which she takes delight. Such delight! When she outlines the plan her immobile body dances with excitement, and her skin crackles with electric anticipation, an almost bluish hue overcoming her.
So, she is different, but much of the difference is not in the desire to act but the willingness to do so. We all have these urges for revenge, for violence. Someone like Kim though will never let them go until they are realised. So, that line of thought fed by her anger that was at first only a filament, wispy and insubstantial, no more than a barely visible conglomeration of the smoke of fantasy that for most would merge with and disappear into the fog of the everyday, has thickened and congealed under the focus of her singular determination and became a teleology that has inexorably wrapped itself around her sister’s fate.
An accounting of the plan:
- Kim convinces Sayyid to participate in a perverse sex game of her imagining (the game being based on her purported fantasy of being sexually assaulted).
- The game is to consist of her arriving at Sayyid’s house and him dragging her in and assaulting her.
- Kim is to ‘resist’ as realistically as possible.
- But she will not be the one resisting as she will not be the one who arrives at the house. Kim will contrive to send her unwitting twin sister Donna there.
- Sayyid will presume Donna is Kim and commit the assault.
- After the act has been carried out, I will arrive, sedate Donna and remove her.
- Sayyid will have been informed that my presence is necessary as part of the game.
- Sayyid, having done his part, will withdraw with my assurances that all is well.
- Now my important contribution: I am to hypnotise Donna into believing that it was she who had arranged the sex game with Sayyid.
What interests Kim most about this is the long-term psychological destruction this is likely to wreak. Donna is normal. Or at least normal enough. The guilt and confusion at her having done this to herself along with the trauma of the act itself is likely to result in one of two outcomes, Kim has mused. First, and probably most likely, a mental breakdown. Second, and more interesting, repeated attempts to do the same thing to herself in an attempt to justify the original trauma. I’m not a psychologist, but the theoretical basis on which Kim based this latter conclusion seems somewhat flimsy to me. Not that I listen to all the details, not that it’s the words that fascinate me so much as, as usual, her skin.
Germane to mention at this point that despite Kim’s faith in my abilities, which I have consistently encouraged and confirmed with her, I can do none of what she asked of me except administer the injection. I cannot hypnotize Donna into forgetting.
To explain, hypnosis (along with its associated forms of mental manipulation) though it has its uses off the stage and has been employed by the medical profession, by criminals, by the military, by businesses, by politicians, and others, both philanthropically and maliciously, competently and incompetently, and in all its varieties and to various degrees to achieve an enormous range of outcomes fair and foul, there are, in my experience, as a professional and lifelong student of the art, some things attributed to it in popular culture that it most definitely cannot do, and those include falsely convincing someone, for the long term, that they are responsible a serious act of violence whether against themselves or another. The related emotions and their material causes ultimately run in currents beneath that which any hypnotic dive can navigate and their contents will always eventually surface.
So, there will be no permanent forgetting, there will be remembering, and accounting, and police, and proof, and a trial. And because of that, though I can help Kim with the injection and though I will go to the house, I will go there as savior. Donna will thank me, Sayyid will withdraw, and Kim, ultimately, will be punished.
§
The road, soft and inviting, awash in subtle colour, reminds me of the first time I took drugs. The effect is not so intense now as then, but it’s odd nonetheless that such a resonance should overcome me as I make my way the hundred yards or so to Sayyid’s house from my parked car.
The rain has stopped, and a creeping of freed light has struggled through the clouds to illuminate my way. I feel a freshness I haven’t felt for years, as if a new person is growing inside me, and yet it mixes uncomfortably with the anxiety of what I’m about to do.
My legs walk themselves to the door of the semi-detached house inside of which something terrible, or beautiful—depending on your perspective—has just happened, and I wonder distractedly as I approach the entrance if the outside camera can pick up my face and how I look to it, about what it says about me. I’ll no doubt watch this part too. But it’s not me I want to see. It never is.
The door advances on me, a light green door that grows in my vision, and before I realize it, it opens at my hand to reveal the dull light of a hallway behind into which streams a bright shaft of light from another doorway to my left, through which I know are Donna and Sayyid, and I brace myself for the scene of personal destruction I am about to witness.
I enter the room and see them… in flagrante delicto. The woman… smiles, and her partner turns. I hear a noise behind me. Before I can look around, I am hit and collapse. Someone removes the needle from my hand and pierces my shoulder with it.
The skin, white and flickering, faintly moist in the bright light, taut around a skull in which two large sockets hold two dark orbs, irises deep and black. The skin fascinates, hums a reverberating message, plays an offbeat tune. I listen with my eyes.
Behind Kim is a monitor. She turns and turns it on, stepping from the centre of my vision to reveal the screen. From my other side a figure steps into my vision. Donna.
On the screen is me. I am prone. One woman is standing behind me and one in front. A man who had been standing next to the woman in front and who is naked from the waist down, moves behind me and bends over me. He removes my trousers and underwear.
I remember now.
Kim ruffles my hair as if I were her favoured child.
Donna and Sayyid
I met Donna on a dating site.
According to her profile, she was a doctor. According to mine, I was the editor of a magazine. No matter. Everyone exaggerates on their dating site profile. Or everyone with any sense at least. On a competitive playing field, you take every edge you can get. I can’t imagine an honest person ever getting laid, I really can’t.
So, I lied, and she lied, but she was a better liar than me and her enthusiasm blinded me. I admit I got wrapped up in her. She was imperfect in perfect ways. There appeared to be no excess in her deception. My lies were, looking back on it, clumsy and amateur by comparison. All I knew was to pretend to be a nice guy looking for a nice girl. She, on the other hand, knew how to be much more.
And as it turned out, she was a doctor. Of sorts. An anesthesiologist. The rest was all bullshit though. The strip poker and all that. She didn’t take long before telling me. She couldn’t wait to rub my nose in it in case I found out first myself. These little wins were important to her.
I didn’t admit much. Didn’t tell her everywhere I’d been. Though she might have been impressed. Actually, it was partly because she might have been impressed. If she thought I was trying to impress her, she definitely wouldn’t have believed it. That was the type she was. It was a no-win to bring all that up.
She knew I had a tough streak anyway. I looked tough. Sometimes that was enough for people. Even for her at the beginning. Though at least she probed. I could feel that. She would get inside you one way or the other. And I didn’t mind it. Didn’t mind it at all.
So, she was a sort of doctor but even though I did work for a magazine, I’m not even a sort of editor, I’m not any kind of one. I told her that because she wanted a story published, fancied herself big time, and I had to tell her I’m only the first rung. And she just said, forget it then, annoyed. Didn’t even show it to me. She always wanted something though. And this was next.
§
I already have a hard-on from banging Donna when the hypnotist comes in, but that doesn’t make it all that much easier. She watches me as I pull his trousers and underwear off. At least he didn’t shit himself. It only occurred to me just now that he might have done. I almost wished he had to be honest, so I could back out. I’m feeling a bit sick about the whole thing. I look towards the curtained windows as if someone might be staring through, and then back towards Kim’s impatient eyes. Donna to my side puts the needle on the table and her right hand on my back encouragingly. I kneel over taking him in my hands.
Maybe she did know something about my background. You’d have to wonder. She knew I’d do it. She’d seemed confident the whole way through. Anyway, I do it. I’d done it before. It wasn’t the first time. She must have known.
It’s odd what people want done to them, There’s no accounting for people. Like this nutter. Pays a mint to have himself buggered on camera in front of a couple of chicks. Donna told me all about him. Kim had met the perv online and it hadn’t taken more than a week before he suggested it. God knows how many others he tried. But she took him up on it. Got Donna in, got me in. Well, his choice when you think about it. Most people would probably say no. Most probably did. Not Kim and Donna though. They were made from different stuff. And the money. There’s always the money.
Anyway, it’s done and I’m on my way out. Got an advance on my cut too. I’m not stupid. Pull my pants up and tell them, ‘All yours, ladies’, and they just look at me, the two of them.
‘Look, I’m out of here. You can send me the rest later. He’s all yours. I’ve done my bit.’
‘I think you better stay a while.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, the thing is…’
So then they tell me. He hadn’t agreed to anything. He hadn’t agreed and hadn’t paid any money. That was their money. They set him up. But there’ll be money later. They say. After they show him the tape and all. That’s the plan. The rest was just bullshit. And they’re sorry, but I’ve just raped a man, and that’s serious, and yeah, bitches, they want the advance back. And it’s all on tape. They have me by the balls. I consider picking up the nearest blunt object and just beating the shit out of both of them. Beating and beating. It wouldn’t be the first time I had to do that. But I’m already. It’s already…
§
Donna and Kim enter the room and the assistant closes the door behind them. In front of them are two high-backed chairs through the middle of which a suited man can be seen sitting behind a large desk.
The man’s face is tan with a tinge of grey, not yet reached the stage of jowling but creased in the cheeks. The face is longer than normal, and when engaged in speech, the right side moves less than the left, and is set lower—a minor droop, not something that would make an observer suspect a palsy or stroke but effecting a definite asymmetry that is discomfiting if focused on.
The color of the face doesn’t change at all temporally and is also mostly uniform spatially only darkening in micro-areas where moles and other imperfections break up the brown field of skin, furrowed as it is by the major crease in the cheeks and other more minor trenches across the forehead as well as some running from the eyes and from the corners of the mouth.
There are two light sources in the editor’s office. One is the window behind him and one is a bright bulb above and between him and the women. The blinds on the window are half shut, but enough light comes through to combine with the bulb light to create a mixed illumination effect on the faces of the two women as well as a relatively brighter luminosity than the man, who has his back to the window so the only direct light reaching his face comes from the bulb.
The women’s faces are very still and white, framed in long brown manes swept neatly back and around them. There are no obvious blemishes or patching on the white, and that cannot fully be attributed to makeup considering the discernible natural glow issuing from them and the unobscured minute tracings of blue veins on their facial peripheries. And it is a white formed of the subtlest of shades moving rhythmically through it, a pure rippling white, like the foam on ocean waves.