sarah 2> /dev/null
* * *So very far away.
Sarah felt like she was at the bottom of a swimming pool filled with warm water, being held down, but not minding. Her vision was blurry but her eyes kept closing anyway.
Periodically she tried to get up or shift her position, but something prevented her from moving. It wasn’t just a fantasy—she really was being held down, she just kept forgetting that that was the case. She was face down on a table or thin bed. It had a hole cut out for her face, letting her see straight down to an off-white floor. It was like one of those tables that people got massages on. Whenever she tried to move something on the back of her neck and arms stopped her. Had she been any more than barely conscious she would have quickly realized that she was strapped down—at the neck, upper arms, and wrists—but she was not even conscious enough to remember to keep trying to get up. After a few moments of trying she would mew a weak complaint then forget again. Her eyes would unfocus again. She would drift in and out of consciousness again.
The entire back of her head was numb. It was like she had been given a massive dose of novocaine back there; there was sensation in her cheeks and forehead, but around her ears it started to tingle and that was it. Beyond that was vague twilight that she occasionally sensed pressure on, but nothing more.
Something else: the smell of fresh shampoo. During one periods of near-lucidity she’d felt like her head was damp, and then there was that smell, pleasant and clean.
Her hair had been shampooed. She was not in any condition to make guesses about why, if that was indeed what had happened. She was not even in any condition to keep her eyes focused.
“Almost there,” Leigh’s voice said. This caused Sarah to try to raise her head and fail again.
The off-white blur that encompassed her vision darkened: a shadow. Leigh was standing beside her. Sarah could see her legs. They were no longer the pale bareness they’d been earlier in the evening; now they were the ugly green of hospital scrubs. Her shoes too. Was Leigh a nurse? Had she bumped her head and, in dream logic, been taken to a hospital where the nurses were all Leigh?
“It’s time to turn you on,” Leigh said, her voice close and smiling. She squeezed Sarah’s buttock. “Not like that. We’ll do that later. It’s time to literally turn you on: to power you up.”
Her hand slid up a bit and rested on Sarah’s lower back. From the touch Sarah could feel that her bathing suit was still on down there, but up top she was bare. At some point Leigh must have sat her up and undressed her. While a sober, in-her-right-mind Sarah would have been horrified at this realization, barely-conscious-heavily-drugged Sarah was not only unconcerned, but vaguely aroused. She was being taken advantage of. It stirred something primal and physical within her.
The shadows shifted and something appeared on the floor in front of her. The something began to blink: a red LED light. It went off and on in an even rhythm.
Blink, blink.
“I want you to look at that light and count the flashes for me. Can you do that?”
Sarah was already doing it.
Blink, blink.
One, two.
Blink, blink, blink.
Three…
Sarah became the rhythm, as easily and inevitably as breathing.
She was being hypnotized, she recognized that. It was no stranger than anything else that was happening to her, and she was just as equipped to resist it.
She was totally unaware of the passage of time. She was in a cool place outside of everything until, from very far away, Leigh said, “Here we go.”
Sarah’s vision exploded into a billion flaming pieces.
Chaos.
A swirling cataclysm of chaoses.
Meaningless colors and shapes, moving, combining, disassembling and recombining. It was abstract yet somehow real.
It all began to draw together, as if corralled by an outside force. The many shifting and thrashing parts were squeezed, crushed down into a ball.
It shrank smaller and smaller until it was finally a point, pure white and uniform.
There was nothing but the point, now.
It was perfect and it was forever.
“Your name is Null. Say it.” Leigh’s voice, from somewhere in the light.
“My name is Null.”
“You are what you are experiencing right now and nothing more.”
She was a point of perfect light.
“Say it.”
“My name is Null. I am a point of perfect light.”
Leigh paused at this description, amused. “I knew you were the right one,” she said softly. “I knew as soon as I saw you. I knew you were going to come up and talk to me at the movies, then come here, then drink that drink and end up in my chair. I knew it, I saw it all as soon as I saw you.”
The point of light began to grow, and as it did it became clear that there was something in it, like the light at the end of a tunnel. It grew at exactly the rate the light at the end of a train tunnel does: slowly, slowly, then rapidly growing and encompassing everything.
It was the lab that Sarah had been brought to after Leigh incapacitated her with a roofie.
Null was lying on her back. The cold track lighting still lined the ceiling and was just as bright as before, but it didn’t bother her anymore. Leigh leaned over and shined a pen light in her eyes like a doctor does: first one eye, then the other.
“Sit up, if you can.”
Null tried to sit up; she got about halfway before she became weak and began to cant to the side. Leigh got an arm behind her and helped her the rest of the way.
“That’s ok, that’s the sedative. I was expecting that. I don’t think it’s… I don’t think anything went wrong. If it had you wouldn’t even be able to speak. Trust me, I know what it looks like when this fails.” She let out a nervous, humorless laugh. Her eyes were dark with exhaustion.
“The tools she gave me were perfect, and so were the instructions, but I’m not her. The first two times I tried this… were not successful.” Her mouth became a thin bloodless line. She was talking to herself, maybe talking herself down from whatever she’d been doing to the back of Sarah’s head all night. “They were prostitutes. No one’s looking for them.”
Null absorbed this information impartially. Sarah would have taken it as evidence that Leigh was the most dangerous person she’d ever been in the presence of.
“But it worked. It worked.” She let out a long, shuddering sigh.
She looked at Null with a mixture of apprehension and desire. Her natural confidence was nowhere to be seen at that moment; she seemed as anxious and unsure as a middle schooler at her first dance.
She reached up to touch Null’s shoulder, but pulled her hand back as if afraid to. Took another deep breath. Then touched Null’s arm with the back of her hand, as if afraid to touch it with her fingers.
“You’re real.”
She was real. Her name was Null. She was a point of perfect light.
“Here.” Null was still topless, her lifeguard uniform gathered in a roll of material on her hips. Leigh took her hand, put it through the arm hole, and pulled it up over her shoulder. She repeated the process for the other side, then made a few tugs here and there so that Null’s breasts were situated properly in it. “I can’t get over how fucking hot you are in this thing. I think I might have a thing for girls in bathing suits. And a lifeguard uniform is basically the epitome of that.
“Look at me.” She took Null’s face and turned it towards her. “You will always wear that under your clothes. It is your Nullsuit. It means you are Null and you belong to me. You’re like a superhero, but instead of wearing a superhero outfit under your clothes, you wear that.
“You are my house-girl. Say it.”
“I am your house-girl.”
House-girl.
“Tell me your name, what you always wear, and what you are.”
“My name is Null. I always wear my Nullsuit. I am Leigh’s house-girl.”
“Jesus.” Leigh suddenly kissed her—very deeply. Her tongue darted within Null’s mouth. Null returned the kiss but took no initiative of her own. “Jesus,” Leigh breathed into her mouth. “You are so fucking hot. Jesus.” She kissed Null again and her hands moved to Null’s shoulders and squeezed them. One hand moved down and cupped Null’s breast, then pulled back the stretchy material at the armpit and slipped inside. Her thumb ran over Null’s nipple, which hardened in response.
“Ok. Ok.” She kissed Null once more then broke away with some effort. “It’s too soon, I’m worried we might get carried away and break your sutures. We’ve got to get you upstairs for some real, natural sleep, and I need some too. You don’t remember it, but I’ve been working on you for almost 12 hours, and anesthesia is not sleep.
“Swing your legs over the edge. Put your arms around my neck.”
Null maneuvered her disconnected-feeling body as best she could. She wrapped her arms around Leigh’s neck and clung to her as she was pulled to a standing position. Her legs were rubbery.
Leigh’s petite body felt good against her. She was the exact right height to fit under her arms like that, and to do the drunken walk they’d done on the way down and were now starting to do to get back up: Leigh gripping the railing, bracing them, moving them up a step, releasing the railing and gripping it again a foot higher, repeat.
They gained the landing and paused there. Leigh seemed to consider.
“I’d really love to not have to go all the way upstairs right now, but the bed is really big up there and I want to sleep beside you. And I’d rather Sarah wake up there, if she does.” They moved down the hall. “She shouldn’t remember anything. Most roofies are amnesiacs; it’s why people black out. Alcohol multiplies the effect.
“But she panicked so much at the needle that I’m worried she might remember that, even though it took probably less than 30 seconds. Does Sarah have a fear of needles or something?”
“Yes,” Null said.
“That explains it. She fixated it on it like it was a fucking tarantula or something. Ok, that’s fine. She still probably won’t remember it, or if she does it will seem like a dream.” Up the next set of stairs. They were wider than the basement steps, with a big fancy banister on one side and railing on the other. They did the same drunken crabwalk up these, then moved down a richly carpeted hall to a door near the end.
The room’s decor was odd. It didn’t look like a teenage girl’s bedroom at all. The color scheme was black and white: white sheets and comforter, black bed frame and posts. White desk, black chair. White walls with black curtains, like the song. It was like a chessboard. Sarah would have thought it was quite odd; Null simply glanced at it dully as she was led to the bed.
Leigh sat her down. “Lay back.” She took Null’s legs and swung them up on the bed. Then she stood back and looked at Null for a very long moment. Her face was exhausted, but she was smiling. “So perfect,” she said under her breath.
“I’m going to wrap you up, so Sarah won’t be able to slip away if she wakes up before me. Put your arms to your sides.” She flipped the edge of the comforter up over Null, then, with a little grunt, rolled her over onto her stomach. She got up onto the bed and did it again.
Null was now face up on the opposite side of the bed with the blanket wrapped around her twice tightly, swaddled like a baby.
“There.” Leigh tucked a pillow behind her head. “A housegirl burrito.” She left the room and returned with her tablet. “You won’t have any trouble sleeping like that, promise. You won’t have any trouble sleeping ever again.”
Leigh touched the tablet and a bottomless heaviness settled upon Null. She was asleep in seconds.