What she really wanted...
It was so easy it scared me.
I sat her in front of my computer and told her to watch the screen carefully, as I put the headphones over her ears.
“What’s it going to do?” She asked me nervously.
“I’m just going to reprogram certain parts of your unconscious.” I replied. The fact that she trusted me and wanted to please, was a big help but that wasn’t what made it work.
“As you watch the screen, there will be a piece of music playing through the earphones,” I continued. “Underneath the music will be a variety of subliminal messages. They will do all the work; you won’t have to do a thing. I know you’re interested to know how it works and what it actually does, but first, just watch and listen, when it’s over we’ll discuss it at length.”
“OK.” She nodded, acquiescing.
She was nervous but brave. She was ‘into’ the whole ‘going under hypnosis’ thing but filled with trepidation. She looked warily at the blank computer screen, adjusting her seat in the chair as though determined to do whatever needed to be done. Swept her hair back from her face one last time, shook her head relaxing her neck muscles, she was tense. I put a hand on her shoulder.
“Relax,” I said. “It’ll be more effective if you let go some of the tension.”
She licked her lips, blinked a couple of times, nodded again and relaxed. ‘This is one very disciplined lady’, I decided. The stiffness drained out of her shoulders beneath my fingers, her breathing became less controlled and more natural. She consciously went through whatever exercises she was used to do, to go into a sort of premeditative state. ‘Probably does yoga’, I thought. Then, she was ready.
I turned the computer screen gizmo on, and she was transfixed.
It was no big deal; really, I’d downloaded some Hypno-Helper program off the web, and installed it on my hard-drive. It’s a black and white spiral wheel revolving anti-clockwise at varying speeds. The inside of the spiral looks as though it’s getting bigger while the outer rim appears to be shrinking. I’d tried it out on myself numerous times; there’s no looking away from it once it’s switched on. Almost a comic-book caricature of a hypnotist’s tool for inducing trances in unwilling subject; it’s totally riveting.
The music was just a piece of Vivaldi I’d chosen because it’s very lively and full of dance rhythms, about a minute in length I’d looped the piece to keep on repeating itself.
After ten minutes I switched both the sound and the spiraling image off. I removed the headphones from her ears and swiveled her chair around to face me. She leaned forwards on the edge of her chair. She had that look in her eyes, as though to say, “I have been to the mountaintop... I have seen the promised-land.”
“Look at me.’ I told her. Her eyes shot up to meet my gaze as though electrified. Her whole look was wide-eyed, alert, questioning.
“Would you like me to tell you what has just been done to you?”
She nodded rapidly, “O, Please, yes,” she said.
“Your brain has just had some new wiring circuits put in it,” I said, “you’ve been given a whole set of new tools to work with. It’s something I’ve been working on for about ten years, ever since I did that Ph.D. research on Subliminal Retinal Vectors, that I was telling you about. I could rattle off all the technicalities, but what it boils down to is this. There are now some immensely powerful devices at your disposal. The most difficult part of my job now, is going to be to show you how to access them without your losing control. “At the most basic level,” I continued with deadpan seriousness, making most of it up it up as I was going along; “is your new ability to control your body temperature. Focus your attention for a moment on your hands resting on the arms of your chair. If you pay a little attention to the heat you feel coursing through the skin of your right hand you may notice that it is a little warmer than your left hand. What you are doing is controlling the blood-flow to your hands, dilating the veins in the one while constricting the veins in the other. As a result you may begin to feel the skin temperature of the two hands begin to diverge. Your right hand feels hotter than that left, it even tingles with the heat. It’s not an unpleasant sensation and it will be very useful to you if ever you are troubled by headaches. Being able to control skin temperature is crucial to eliminating headaches, you know. ”
As I was talking she started momentarily, as though shocked. She could feel it! By God, I felt so powerful; I almost laughed out loud. She was looking at her hands as though in disbelief. There was no question but she could distinguish a temperature variance between her two limbs. I’d remembered reading something about biofeedback, skin temperature control and migraines. Scientific American or Readers Digest? Who knows...? I just kept on talking.
“Of course,” I continued, as though unimpressed with the results, “the ability to control your body’s internal mechanisms such as your body-core temperature can be a life-altering evolutionary-leap. But they are the lowest level at which your new powers operate. I’ve given you much more valuable stuff as well. Do you notice how the arm that is warmer also feels lighter, while the cooler arm seems heavier?”
She gasped.
“There are whole new networks and junction boxes wired into your system that you will have to encounter and learn about.” I said. “D’you notice the difference in weight between the two halves of your body? How the right, hot, light side seems to want to rise up while the left, cold heavy side wants to sink into the chair? Have you any idea how much power there is stored in the neural synapses controlling your musculature? See what happens when you increase the temperature in your right arm and it continues to grow lighter.”
I changed gears. " You may be feeling very excited,” I sounded deadly serious, “but, for the learning to happen in sequence it’s important not to lose touch with your bodily sensations. Can you feel how restful your entire physical body is? Stay in touch with how heavily it is situated in the chair, how your thighs fit into the seat and the muscles of your lower back just rest there over your hips, while the heat and cold in the two arms just continues to grow. ”
She sighed as though she had just found heaven.
“We’ll talk more of these motor neural abilities in the future.” I said, ignoring the fact that her arm was sticking up almost vertically. She was looking at it as though it belonged to someone else, wondering what it was doing attached to her body. “Another thing I’ve done is release some of your Unconscious Neuro-Linguistic Inhibitor Mechanisms.” I continued, shuffling through some files and paper on the desk. Out of the corner of my eye I watched her left hand try and pull her right arm down out of its rigor-vitae, (as opposed to rigor-mortis). She might as well have tried sticking her elbow in her ear. “Would you like to know what that means?” I asked.
Looking directly at her, into her eyes, pretending to be capable of not noticing her arm sticking rigidly up, I watched her wondering whether to bring her arm to my attention. She went for the next most important thing.
“O, Yes, could you explain what else you’ve done to my brain?”
“Well, there’s now a program sitting at the top of your mind’s filing system. Where before there was a mechanism that prevented you from acting on your deepest desires, a sort of chaperone-counselor-parent-judge-filter, which inhibited you from acting out your most profoundly felt drives regardless of the extent of your urge, there is now no unconscious braking or governor mechanism. So you will have very little warning of any act that might expose your innermost impulses. You may have to deal with them at a much higher level of consciousness.”
She nodded. “I’ve become aware of that over the last couple of minutes.” She said. “But there’s much more you’re not telling me about, isn’t there?”
Now it was my turn to nod sagely. I wondered what she was getting at. She was feeling something I hadn’t anticipated. I looked at her expectantly, raised my eyebrows as though giving her the cue to speak.
“There’s the pain thing.” She continued, nodding at her arm. I looked at it as though noticing it sticking up there, for the first time. Her fingers were blistering in front of my eyes. The back and front of her right hand were leaking plasma. It dawned on me... ‘No it can’t be... can it?’ Her skin temperature can’t still be rising can it? I reached over to touch her hand and pulled back sharply. I didn’t need to touch to feel the heat radiating off. Was that the smell of charred flesh...? ‘O My god! Surely that’s my imagination, how hot can it be?’
“I don’t know how I know this,” she said, “but my right hand skin temperature is now one hundred and seventeen degrees Fahrenheit. But there’s no pain, none at all. For a moment there I thought I’d burnt right through the nerves, silly me.” She giggled apologetically. “I can’t believe how much power you’ve given me.” She said in the voice of one about to effuse in gracious declarations of thanks and acknowledgment. “I think you’re a miracle worker. But of course you know that already, don’t you?” She asked me in all seriousness. I nodded.
“So what will you do now about your hand?” I asked her, feigning calm.
She looked seriously at it for a moment and then smiled at me in purest pleasure. “Oh! You’re surely the most amazing scientist I ever heard of. How did you do it? You’ve thought of everything. I’m going to bring the temperature of my hand down like this, okay. Now I’m going to open the trauma response pathways, like this. And it will be healed without a scar in twenty two hours.”
Her arm came gently down to rest on the arm of the chair. I went to the cupboard for the first aid kit and started wrapping the hand and lower arm. I tried to look unaffected, as though this type of thing happened all the time in my busy practice. Bacitracin and thirty feet of gauze took care of that little drama. I was silent; I didn’t know what to say. But I needn’t have worried; she was only just begun.
“Now I see what you meant when you said your biggest job was going to be protecting me from my own inexperience, preventing me from losing control.” She said it so innocently I was almost troubled with a pang of conscience. “But thank you for giving me control over my pain centers before teaching me that lesson.” She added.
I, in response, waved her compliment away as though my genius of foresight was a ‘mere bagatelle’. I looked down at the desk in front of me and summoned a moment’s silence as though I had something of great moment to share with her. She anticipated me.
“There’s more isn’t there?”
I was getting a lot of hard nodding practice in. I’d practically nodded myself into a Nobel Prize for who-knows-what. It saved me opening my mouth and showing myself up for the ignoramus I was. I felt like Prometheus watching his handiwork burn. I continued to look down at the desktop as though weighing the wisdom of revealing all my secrets to her.
“I suppose I ought to have known you weren’t capable of being one hundred percent altruistic. What man was ever?” She sounded very solemn and fatalistic. “I’m not sure what’s going to happen with this extra bit of programming.” She added thoughtfully, tapping her temple with her bandaged hand. I was silent as though caught by the inescapable veracity in her evaluation of my sad character. She went on conversationally, as though talking to herself. “You’re much too smart to have allowed for the obvious loopholes. And it’s obvious your programming wont allow me to blurt out any of your secrets.”
Turning to me with anger and resignation in her face, she said, “I think there’s something evil about you and your program, Herr Doktor, d’you know? I would have done anything you asked of me for the right and privilege of just being able to get close to you. A man with genius like you, I would have given anything just to be able to work with you. What have you done this to me for?”
I looked at her as though stripped down to my naked, basic, shameful self. I hadn’t actually a clue as to where the conversation was going but I liked it. It was going in my direction. I decided to act. Pointing to the blank computer screen, I motioned for her to pay attention and said. “It’s time for the next phase. Sit down and watch the screen.”
I held my breath, waiting for her to rebel. She gathered up what shreds of dignity she could muster and turned to look expectantly at the screen. I put the phones over her ears again. The spiral whirled away. I gave it twenty minutes. The music this time was a four minute Bach harpsichord piece that would drive anyone totally nuts if they had to listen to it more that five times. I also figured twenty minutes was maximum eye-swizzle time, before those two revolving black and white worms would reach right out of the computer display and bite her nose off.
I switched it off, removed the headphones and left her alone. She took a deep breath, shook her hair and sighed. I said nothing.
A few minutes of silence passed. She began to cry. It was more than a little weird to watch because although she was obviously deeply distraught she made not a sound. Her body was wracked by sobs but not a murmur passed her lips. I said nothing. All her breathing was being done through her nose and it was pretty snotty and red. She found a handkerchief somewhere among her things and wiped herself off. I watched a little warily, of course, there was no saying what direction this was all going in.
I made out as though I was reading some papers on my desk, looking over my half glasses at her occasionally. I noticed when she began moving; I put my papers down and sat back, reclining in my chair. She stood up and looked a little dazed. She started crying heavily again and wiped her tears and mucus away again. I went back to ‘grading my papers’. She stood there next to my desk swaying a little. She sniffed from time to time but it was obvious she was now dry-eyed. I took off the glasses and settled back in my chair.
“Well!” I said, looking straight into her eyes. She dropped her gaze to her feet, staring intently at her toes as though some vital message was written on them that only she could read. Slowly, as though reluctantly, she moved around my desk, holding on to it as though for support. She reached the edge where she became visible in her entirety. I sat forward in my chair and she towered over me for a moment. Her face shone with the fires of self-determination. There was obviously no turning back for her; she was committed. She fell to her knees next to my chair and put her forehead on its leather-covered arm. I stroked the two cords standing out on the back of her neck. Through her hair I could feel her trembling. I kept on gently massaging the ‘number eleven muscles’, as I thought of them. It was no use; she was not relaxing. She was strung tighter than a piano. I lifted her chin and looked into her face, she was tearful again.
“What’s your name?” I asked her. It had suddenly occurred to me that while I had spent an hour chatting up this woman in the cafeteria, after which we’d been busy with my ‘Program’ for an hour and a half, I had never even asked her for her name. Instead of answering directly she picked up a pen lying on my desk and wrote on a blank piece of paper.
“I have completely forgotten who I was before coming in here and having my brain reprogrammed. I will be whatever you name me. May I ask a question Sir?” She wrote quickly and neatly. I looked at her and nodded.
“Go ahead, ask me whatever you want to know.”
Her hand moved swiftly with the pen. She turned the paper for me to look at and sat back on her haunches watching my face. I leaned over and read the question.
“Will Sir ever give me back my voice?”
I laughed out loud. She hung her head and I watched the tears falling onto the polished wooden floor of my office. How much pain was she putting herself through?
She was obviously totally in control, obvious, that is to everyone but herself. She was completely opaque where her own ego was concerned. She knelt next to my chair, no longer a free woman, awaiting my pleasure.
“I will name you,” I told her gently, “when it pleases me. Curiosity is unbecoming in a slave, and you do not require a voice. Go and wait for me in my car. It’s the silver Volvo in the garage downstairs.” I gave her the keys. She took them and bowed. With eyes down cast she abandoned all her worldly possessions and went to wait for me in my car.