The Juliette Society (9 page)

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.

Even so, I find it absolutely compelling. I can’t stop watching. I’m glued to the screen. I need to see what will happen next. I’m drawn to it the way I’m always drawn towards things that scare me. I see myself in Anna, just as I saw myself in Séverine. And I want to understand why.

9

Today at school a girl killed herself. Her name is Daisy. Was Daisy.

Pretty girl. Sweet girl. And smart. I didn’t know her, but Jack knew her. She’d worked at the campaign office.

The whole campus is in a state of shock. You can almost feel it in the air. When something like this happens, it affects everybody, brings them all together. College campuses are like villages. Everybody is connected to everybody else by no more than two or three degrees of separation. So everybody knew somebody who knew Daisy. And they all need to understand, want to understand, to make sense of the senseless, so they can deal with it, move past it and get on with their lives. But death has a way of making its presence felt long after the fact. It tends to linger.

And, anyway, this keeps happening.

Daisy wasn’t the first. She was the third this year. The second this semester. All girls who seemed to have everything going for them. And decided they had nothing.

I can tell Jack’s really shaken. But he keeps saying he’s OK. He’s so macho in his own way. Refuses to show his weakness, wants me to think he can handle it, and I know he can but I worry all the same.

Bob DeVille has closed the campaign office for the night, out of respect. Not an easy decision to make with an election less than two months away, but the right one. The staff have decided to hold an impromptu wake for Daisy. Bob is going to make an appearance to say a few words, lead them in prayer and rally the troops. A natural leader in a time of mourning.

Jack always jokes he’d make a great President. I always tell him he’s thinking too far ahead. Bob hasn’t even made Government yet. But Jack has high hopes, he looks up to Bob as a kind of father figure, and who am I to dissuade him. Maybe he’s right.

I want to come with Jack tonight. I want to be there for him and support him.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You didn’t know her. It’s better if I go alone.’

And I understand why, but I’m worried about Jack. I want to help him. He’s not letting me in. He’s shutting me out. I’m frustrated. I just want to be by his side and he’s spurned me. And it tears me apart.

When Jack leaves, I feel abandoned. I don’t want to be here, all on my own like this, with my thoughts. All he needed to say is, ‘come with me’. But he didn’t. It’s his call. I don’t want to be angry with him but I can’t help but feel upset. The only way I can stop driving myself crazy by thinking about it is to call someone.

I call Anna. She already knows what happened to Daisy.

‘Did you know her?’ I say.

‘No,’ she says, ‘but we had a mutual friend. A guy.’

I want to talk to Anna but I don’t want to talk about Jack. I want to talk about anything else but Jack, so I blurt out the first thing that comes into my head.

‘I looked at that website,’ I say, ‘the one you told me about.’

‘SODOM?’ she says.

‘Yeah. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. It didn’t look like porn, at least any porn I’ve seen. It looked scary.’

‘It’s not about what it looks like,’ Anna says, ‘it’s about how it feels. It’s not about the scenario, or the situation, but the effect it has on you. About what happens to your body and your mind. And if it’s done right, it feels really good.’

Anna wants me to understand what it feels like when you’re suspended in the air with no means of support other than the ropes that bind you, or constrained in a cage with no means of escape.

‘I feel completely helpless,’ she says, ‘and I just let go and it’s the best feeling in the world.

‘I feel hyper-aware of my body, of every muscle and sinew, of every inch and pound. I can feel even the slightest shift and movement in my body weight. And I become sensitive to every stimuli. Every movement in the air around me. Every movement in the ropes, as they scratch and burn at my wrists, my ankles, around my breasts.’