Surrender to Mr. X Read online

  “Sure,” I said—to Ray. “I’d like that.”

  It occurred to me that there might have been something in the spaghetti bolognaise, or I had been fed with substances while asleep, but there didn’t seem any call to drum up any paranoia about it: Alden and Ray were friends and family now. Alden could get his scientific results without having to resort to drugs; with my help Ray would enter into a new creative phase—after Hasan I quite saw myself as an accomplished sex therapist. I saw the logic in my vocation developing a socially useful role for me. Vanessa could always work through problems that presented, drawing on her memory’s copious access to the wisdom of Jung: Joan could afford to take time off. This was going to be quality time for me, as the “girl who wanted to make a difference.” I sighed happily. Lam leaned into view, and nodded briefly, as if he could read my mind.

  “Whoa,” said Alden. “Not so fast. What are our goals here? Our targets?”

  “Love is the Law, Love under Will,” said Ray. “Joan is to become subject to my will. She’s got none of her own. She will be safer like that. She’s all over the place—it’s the stuff you give her. You were in a hurry just now. What’s changed?”

  “I need to be included,” said Alden.

  “Too true,” said Lam. “Only then Ray paint.”

  He sat peaceably in a corner listening, sweet faced, as a man might who knows things are going well for him.

  “Joan,” said Ray, “you are feeling very happy, aren’t you, and drowsy as can be.”

  “Oh?—yes,” said Joan, but she felt a prickle of doubt: slight but insistent. Vanessa was still somewhere inside, the vocational girl, the one with the First in philosophy, sharp as a needle.

  “And you trust me, don’t you,” said Ray. As an afterthought, after a glance toward Lam, he added, “and Alden too?”

  “That’s better,” said Alden.

  “I am so safe,” said Joan. “So safe with both of you.”

  Now it was Alden’s turn to get cold feet.

  “This is just plain front parlor hypnotism,” said Alden. “You only make people do under suggestion what they’d do anyway. What’s the point?”

  “It’s a question of narrative,” said Ray. “Wait and see.”

  “You wait, see,” said Lam to his master, though I was beginning to wonder quite who was mastering whom.

  “Choose a word, Joan. A nice word but one which won’t be used too often. We don’t want it turning up by mistake in casual conversation.”

  “Theleme,” said Joan, or was it Vanessa, knowing on which side her bread was buttered? “That’s a nice word,” she went on. “Like Thelma, but softer.”

  “Good, good,” said Lam. “Most propitious.”

  “When I say the word Theleme, Joan,” said Ray, “my will is your will. And Alden’s.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’re so kind.”

  “To release my control over you, I say the second word—what will it be?”

  “Sirius,” said Lam. “Sirius—suitable word.”

  “Joan must choose it,” said Ray.

  “Sirius,” I said.

  Wherever Lam was from, I decided hazily, it wasn’t from Tibet. Vanessa remembered reading that in the States a higher proportion of adults in therapy discovered hidden memories of abuse and abduction by aliens than by fellow humans such as their male relatives. But I was floating out of my body now, looking down on myself, knowing that though Joan might be convinced she was “under will,” Vanessa was invincible.

  “When you hear the word Sirius you forget what happened when you were under will.”

  “Can I go home now?” I whispered.

  “No—Theleme—you can’t,” said Ray. “We want you to clear the table now, and wash the dishes.”

  So, I got up and I started to clear the dishes from the table. I was quite sure that I was in my right mind, not hypnotized nor under the will of anyone. I have to admit I got up and did it. I had left home because of my mother’s insistence on me doing exactly this.

  Alden and Ray had been drinking: two thirds of a bottle of whisky had gone. They bickered on while I worked.

  “Supposing we override the forgetting bit,” said Alden. “Supposing I want her to remember? The more physiological reaction I can get out of her the better. Lam toe-to-thumbed her: she lost her temper. That was really useful.”

  “We’re not concerned with your needs,” said Ray. “This is about me.”

  “Besides,” said Alden, “this under-will business is all claptrap. She’d have done the dishes before she went anyway. She’s a good girl.”

  “Sirius,” said Ray. “Joanie, come back and sit with us.”

  I shook myself free—I was not quite sure what of, but it was like a leech falling off the skin when a flame is put to it. I was me. Whoever that was. I went to sit down and helped myself to some whisky.

  “No drink,” said Lam, crossly. I ignored him.

  “Oh, Joanie,” said Ray, in a studiedly casual voice, “will you be a good girl and finish doing the dishes?”

  I gave him an old fashioned look.

  “You must be joking,” I said. “Do them yourself. Why can’t Lam? Isn’t that the kind of thing he does?”

  “Theleme,” said Ray. “Lam is on the Seventh Path and has been sent from the Dog Star to help us, and when you think back that is how you will remember him. You will respect and obey him.”

  “You can’t do that,” said Alden. “Retrospectively.”

  “You’ve skipped some homework,” said Ray. “The bit that says you can. Joan … you are being a bad girl. You don’t want to be a bad girl, so you want to finish the dishes and scrub the floor.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Sorry.” And I got up and went back to the sink.

  “See?” said Ray.

  “She’s playing with you,” said Alden. “She’s just yanking your dick and pulling your leg.”

  I don’t know if I was pretending or if I wasn’t. It was entertaining to act the part of the will-less Joan, but once the part was assumed then perhaps Joan was indeed will-less. Every movement I made felt so exquisitely, sensuously right. I got their dishes done, then decided to look for a bowl, but settled for a saucepan. I searched out a moldy scrubbing-brush beneath the sink. I found the greatest pleasure of my life scrubbing the floor. Had anybody told me to do that?

  I daresay I was meant to forget and in theory should have, but Vanessa heard, saw, remembered as she moved across the room scrubbing—and the floor certainly needed it—what Joan did not. Joan was under will, Vanessa was not. It was Vanessa who heard scraps of phrases: “the secret whore of Babylon” from Ray: “constant copulation, the build up of transforming powers” from Alden: “she the one, she the one” from Lam. Joan just went on scrubbing and wiping and changing the water in the saucepan, without even wearing gloves. She broke a nail. She might as well clip the whole lot: two nails on each hand had already been taken down. She felt she had better stick up for herself.

  I came over to Ray and said, “I’m a bit tired. Can I stop now?”

  “Joan, you are not in the least tired. You have all the energy in the world. Back down on your knees. There is a whole area underneath my easel which must be finished.”

  I went back for more water.

  “No, that’s beyond the call of duty, Ray,” said Alden. “Sit down, Joan.”

  I felt uneasy. What was I to do when instructions conflicted?

  “Alden prevails,” said Lam: I think he did. I know I sat down. Alden wheeled over to me, caught my hand and said, “Joan, listen to me. You have called the taxi and you’ve decided to go home. It was a wonderful evening: spent with your new friends and new family, and you’re looking forward to seeing them again soon. You know what a valuable contribution you are making to their artistic integrity. You are so very proud of that.”

  “So very proud,” I said.

  “Now, Joan,” he said, “you are finally safely home. Isn’t it nice to be back? What wonderful adventur
es you’ve had! Now you can just lie down, put your head on the pillow and go to sleep. But where’s your bed? Oh yes, there is it. Looks very like Ray’s bed, but we know it’s yours. So off to the bathroom, sleepy head, and wash your hands and face.” So I went. I was so comforted by Alden’s caring attention to detail. It would never have occurred to Ray that I might need to go to the bathroom.

  I returned to find the three of them were conferring.

  “Off you go,” said Ray, “off you go, sleepy-head, off with your clothes—just drop them on the floor, you can pick them up in the morning: curl up and snuggle down.”

  And I took off my clothes, dropping them on the floor, went over and got into Ray’s bed, and crawled beneath the heavy quilt, and fell asleep from exhaustion.

  In retrospect, what seemed to happen was that from time to time they’d forget to release me with the word Sirius and I’d remember things they assumed I’d forget. Or else Alden, wanting me to be in a state of intense emotion and reaction all the time, defied Ray into making sure I was. There was a good cop/bad cop routine: Ray “gave me the cigarettes,” Alden “hit me.” Or vice versa. And meanwhile, all the time, I was intimidated by Lam. What a ménage! And I under training as the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, with her constant sexual copulation! (The other kind was spiritual, I was given to understand, not for the likes of me, not being a Thelemite. I was just the talismanic one, the dream lover, to be reached out for.) And all I did, unfeeling, was sleep and dream about nothing at all. Sleep under Ray’s will was notable for its dreamlessness.

  Ray’s bed was delightfully frowsty and warm; though the mattress was rather thin and nobbly, with ancient lumped-up kapok, like the guest bed in the spare room back home at the Rectory. My eyes opened to Ray throwing back the bedclothes: a surprise, because I believed myself to be in my own bed, and so could not work out how he had got to be in my room. He was very drunk: he was trying to get his ratty old sweater off over his head and somehow got caught up in the arms. Alden and Lam stood behind him. I thought Lam had been drinking too—his eyes seemed unfocused, which gave his whole head a fuzzy outline as on TV, when they pixillate-out faces to protect the innocent or the guilty from being recognized. Alden’s smile was just idiotic. I pulled the bedclothes back up to cover me but Lam immediately whipped them off with a tiny movement of his forefinger. I cannot believe myself as a credible witness to Lam’s behavior any more. The heavy quilt seemed to leap across the room.

  Dawn was breaking outside the skylight. I sat up. There didn’t seem much point in worrying about being naked. A small bird peeked down at me from the skylight, before flying off. The room had the look and feel of the early morning after a night before, when resumption of unforgiving day shines its bleak truth over the evidence.

  But it wasn’t all bad. The floor looked so clean, and over in the kitchen area everything gleamed. On the easel Ray’s Blue Box, which had shimmered and glittered so yesterday evening, this morning looked wan and unimpressive. A few hours sleep and I was all Vanessa again, glad to find myself free of Joan. I did not want to be messing about with this bunch of freaks: I wanted a bath, I wanted to get home, I wanted breakfast and to get to work. Feeling sorry for Alden had simply got me into trouble. Something I was trying to remember: what was it? Yes, Crowley’s “compassion is the vice of kings.” How true, but how horrible to say so. Something else my brain was working at: a printed page, an old catalog, Marcel Duchamp’s famous avant-garde painting of 1914, The Green Box. Ninety-three little squares. That number again.

  “Always ninety-three?” I said aloud.

  “Nothing to do with you,” said Alden. They were all seated at the table, staring at me as I woke. “That is priestly knowledge.”

  “You only 156,” said Lam.

  “Scarlet Whore,” said Ray, “of Babylon. Number 156 in the Kabala.”

  Good God, the Kabala strikes me as page after page of uninterrupted tosh. It is hard for the eidetic mind to forget anything: it doesn’t automatically erase what its owner discriminates against, or judges worthless. I needed to be Joan again, nice Joan, whose mind worked normally if slowly, if only to blot out all those tedious pages: the Kabala, the Judaic book of secret knowledge, like the Apocalypse a hundred times over, wild, drug-induced fantasy, interpreted by people who never saw a drug in their lives. The Bible’s Apocalypse is mercifully brief. And then the mind was off again—the flawless red heifer of Jerusalem, who must be sacrificed before the Third Temple can be built. Where could I find a reference to that—of course, Gershom Gorenberg in The End of Days, 2,000 pages on the apocalyptic struggle over the Temple Mount, between Jew, Muslim and Christian. Vanessa’s poor mind was searching pages, feverishly—“I’m getting up,” I said but Ray now had one scrawny leg over me and his clothes off so it was difficult, but I tried. He had a thin wiry body and a long thin questing penis, standing, waving. It had a kink in the middle of it, as President Clinton’s was reputed to do, but Clinton was a fleshy man and Ray was almost painfully thin, so it was the more noticeable.

  “Theleme,” said Alden, and I stopped struggling. Best just to get it over, and then get out of here. I hoped it wouldn’t take too long.

  “Poor Ray,” said Alden. But I was annoyed and hurt, even as Joan. Joan never expected this kind of thing, though Vanessa might well have. Why did he want to give me away? Share me? Did I mean so little to him? Upset must have showed in my face because Alden said, “Do it for my sake, Joan. Be kind to him.”

  His chair was sideways to the bed and he stretched out a hand and touched my shoulder, and smiled sweetly. He wanted a ring-side seat, I could see. But for once I wasn’t an experimental object, just a straight fuck.

  “Ray fucks, he paint,” said Lam, who always got to the point.

  And it was Ray’s bed, after all.

  Ray had few sexual graces. Nor was he the kind you could instruct, like young Hasan, nor would you want to. I lay up against the pillows: he wormed his way into me, and burrowed away. I could feel the kink, and that was exciting, and before I knew it I took myself by surprise by coming, a kind of early morning elation, and Alden was leaning forward, interested, which in itself was stimulating because he usually went away and watched from a distance. There was no suggestion of an incipient threesome—other than Alden’s voyeurism, let alone, mercifully, a foursome. Lam seemed to have fallen asleep on his chair. His mighty eyes were closed. I daresay he was in truth just an ordinary rather pale, rather clammy young man with mild thyroidism from a dingy suburb, of the kind who might flourish as servants, and any other impression was a retrospective suggestion from Ray.

  And now Ray had my attention because he was coming and coming, and shouting—it is nice to elicit such a noisy response from a man, pleasant to have such power over another person—but then, without warning, he was weeping. Hot tears fell on me and I felt such indulgence toward him and wanted to comfort him, and glad to be able to offer this service.

  “It worked,” Ray whimpered, “it worked. She is the promised 156.”

  “Bloody crap,” said Alden. “It worked because you’re so drunk you forgot you couldn’t do it.”

  “I am a master of the universe,” said Ray, and fell off me and fell asleep. Alden and Lam departed and I got up and had a bath and made breakfast. The sun shone in, the work on the easel had come back to life, I found some very good coffee, and as good an apricot comfiture as even the Olivier could provide. I was in no particular hurry to go elsewhere.

  I listened to Radio 4, the magaziney trivialities washing comfortably over me, the announcers’ voices trained to emphasize meaningless words and raise and lower their inflections in any way as long as it has nothing to do with what they were saying. They could call this anodyne logozac, or wordzac: a comforting muzak of thought and language for people who like me at the moment craved cerebral downtime; unlike me, though, a lot of people out there must want that twenty-four seven. I was in no particular hurry to go anywhere. The Scarlet Whore of Babylon is at home everywhere.
She has no fight with her circumstances.

  Domesticity

  FOR THE NEXT WEEK I cleaned by day and fucked by night, like any traditional housewife. They had discovered another use for me, if only by accident. Having found their Whore of Babylon it was not enough: she could clean the house, iron the shirts, buy the food, make the dinner and run errands too. Let her find the envelopes, lick the stamps, and run to the post.

  “You can’t just sit about here idle all day,” as Alden put it. “You’d be bored.”

  They preferred me to live in. Loki drove me over to Little Venice and we came back with a couple of suitcases.

  “I don’t want too much of your female stuff cluttering up the place,” said Alden. I called Max and told him my mother was ill and I’d be away for a few weeks. Management was so pleased with me—Hasan’s family had apparently made a booking for the entire winter season—Max said he reckoned I could come and go as I liked. But he’d miss me: what had really happened? Had I fallen in love? He was quite a romantic, Max. I told him I thought perhaps I had.

  I could think of no other reason for my behavior—transformation of proud independent woman into placid cow—other than that perhaps I really was “under will,” or else that being Joan kept the clatter and torment of wild thoughts at bay, and the sheets of print in my mind safely sealed in their files. My mother always complained that I went to extremes, and I could see that it was true. I either thought too much or too little.

  I was given a little room off the master bedroom with the Lukas multi-sensory bed and the white patchwork quilt. It had no windows but it had a vast television screen, a computer, access to the Internet, and an iPod to keep me happy. Not that I was able to spend much time in here. Alden, attended by Lam, would have to be got out of the house to his Arts-Intrinsick meetings: he would have mislaid papers, decided he was wearing the wrong tie, and then he couldn’t find the day’s entry code that served instead of a house key, and so on. I would have to do the running to and fro.