This will make more sense if you have read the previous parts.
She never learned, and, as a chattel slave-girl, will never again be in a position to ask, so that she has to accept that she will never know how long that interlude was, what exactly was done to her; that dreamtime away from the world, when she lived without living, when she breathed underwater, when she lost all ability to distinguish between day and night, between waking and dreaming, between pleasure and pain, between madness and sanity.
That period during which Jennifer— the Jennifer that she had been for 23 years— was effectively overwritten. Not erased, but rather thoroughly transformed by the imposition of an experience which undermined everything that she had thought she knew about herself.
Never again was she to feel confident about any aspect of herself. Everything fixed, solid, reliable was undone in that period, and when she was at last permitted to surface, she was so lost, so fearful, so disturbed that she was willing to accept any consistency as if it were truth; even when that consistency told her that being whipped until she screamed, every single day, was not just a requirement, but something she must give herself up for sweetly, must open herself to, must work with, to make sure that her experience of pain was searing, intense and destructive.
Even when that truth was that her highest calling was to be raped— to project her sexual vulnerability, her need for violent usage so clearly as to provoke vicious and powerful desire in others, and that her most urgent offers should be to those whom she believes are the most cruel.
Of course, since accepting these things was so manifestly insane, so obviously flew in the face of everything decent and right and just, that her urgent need to accept them was simply further evidence that she was lost, that she needed order— even if that order were cruel and destructive, that she could not rely upon herself, must rely on the order of others, any order being better than the terrifying prospect of having to trust herself, who had been proven so untrustworthy.
Her time in the tank seemed both an eternity, and an instant; an eternity of emptiness, of absence of all sensation, an absence which her busy brain had filled with endless hallucinations, fantasies, nightmares, visions, madnesses. A mere instant in her life; occupying no time, since nothing real had taken place.
She had existed in the tank, blind; neither warm nor cold, unable to move; not free but at the same time floating, weightless; she was fed and evacuated through tubes; she spoke to no-one. No-one spoke to her. Mostly she heard and saw and felt and smelt and tasted … nothing.
In the Sensory Deprivation Tank
At unknowable intervals, she was brought from the tank by people in cloaks and nightmare masks, her own head would be encased in an opaque and heavy hood, through which she could see nothing and hear nothing; a hood which was tight to her face— an integral ring gag stretched her mouth painfully wide (wider and wider over time, so that by the end her jaw was permanently half dislocated, so that without determined and continuous control, her mouth would fall wide open). The back of the hood, by contrast, seemed heavy and hard, and she felt it extended, back down over her neck.
She would be strung up by the arms, legs stretched apart, and whipped until her back, her buttocks, her breasts, the inner skin of her thighs bled, all without a word being spoken.
At other times, she was bent over backwards over an indoor version of the trolley she had been delivered on, her erogenous zones methodically and mechanically stimulated in a variety of ways, until they had hit upon what would bring her to the heat of passion most reliably. They would get her close to orgasm, again and again, them impose cruel electrical shocks at her mouth and sex, then repeat, sometimes over ten or more cycles, before she was forced to what were, by then, terribly painful and distressing orgasms.
In the tank, she was dreamily aware that at times there were electrical stimuli, which would cause her body to spasm, more or less intensely. In her floating permanent dream, she could not decide whether the sensation of this was pleasure or pain.
And in time, as her memory of what it had been like to walk, and talk, and eat, and hear, and choose;— all became more dreamlike than the tank, more improbable than her hallucinations, more unbelievable that her wildest fantasies, the forced orgasms first, and then eventually the whipping too, came to be longed for, anticipated, fantasised about, during the interminable periods of nothingness, of loss, of negation, of emptiness.
Where, earlier, she had resisted the awful hood, had struggled, however weakly, to resist being chained for the whip, being mounted on the trolley, she was now eager, compliant— helpful, even— offering her hands up for the chains, opening her legs, holding herself open for the whip— presenting her buttocks when they were behind her, her breasts when they were in front, spreading her knees as the chains would permit to open her thighs when they came to thrash her between the legs.
Likewise, on the trolley, she ceased to try and resist orgasm, hoping to delay the terrible electrical shocks. Now she worked her body, helplessly, urgently, sensuously— learning without thinking about it just how she must move in order to encourage most active stimulus from her tormentors, working to bring her orgasm on, knowing it would be denied her in the most vicious of ways, eager for sensation, for extreme sensation in particular, of any kind, to sustain her during the interminable, deathly periods of nothingness.
Real pain was infinitely more important to her than hallucinatory pleasure.
She even learned, in the end, to welcome the feeding tube which was forced down her throat, the enema tube thrust into her anus without the slightest sensitivity, vigorously shunted, as if she were no more than a drain to be unblocked.
This became her world. She knew no other, and in the absence of all sensation but what was intended to brainwash her, she had adapted herself to live within it as well she might.
She was not happy, she was not sad; those concepts had no purchase. She had no choices; everything that happened to her was ordained. She could not move unless controlled to do so. All she could do was breathe; nothing she thought or did made the slightest difference to what happened to her, save for her offering herself into the cruelties which were the only remission from the tank.
Almost insensibly, things changed; at some point she realised that her legs could be opened so wide that they formed a straight line— her childhood ambition to be able to achieve ‘the splits’ had been enforced upon her. Also, her hands, always behind her, could now come together at the nape of her neck, be held there by the lightest ties to the back of her collar.
The dreams, hallucinations, nightmares— no way of knowing which was which— all became one. At some point, it seemed to her that the tank mask stopped being a blindfold, that there were video projections on the ceiling of the space where she was kept; videos which were by turns nightmarish and idyllic, pornographic and artistic, obscene and horrific. Were these dreams? She could not tell, for at other times the opacity of the mask seemed incontrovertible.
She forgot her name.
She was unaware that she had forgotten her name until the time when something changed.
She is taken from the tank, and not put into the hood, only furnished with a small blindfold. She is carefully— almost gently— dried with a fluffy towel and given dry shoes (the extreme heels welcome to her permanently extended feet).
She can hear noises, which are both poignantly familiar and terribly strange, and eventually understands that the people who are manhandling her, whom she is doing everything she can to work with, are speaking to each other. Speaking words— although something has happened to her ears after so long underwater, and she finds it very hard to guess at what they might be saying.
It is an overwhelming revelation, and she feels tears coming to her eyes, feels her heart swelling as if it might burst.
Something real is happening to her; something personal, involving other humans!
A phrase comes to her, in a voice she cannot place, which is at once from long, long ago and far, far away, and at the same time urgently, immediately important;
When we want to see you cry you’ll cry, never fear — but otherwise a pretty smile is what we want — a pretty smile that says ‘fuck me, I’m easy, and I’m weak’.
That’s it; the important thing: she is not permitted to shed tears, unless they have been forced from her, and she blinks, hard, trying to remember how to smile.
She doesn’t get the feeling anyone is paying attention; everything is very different from the times that they take her to be whipped, or mount her on the trolley to abuse her with orgasms. She is pathetically, foolishly eager to keep them from changing their minds, weakly and earnestly smiling as best she can, her body almost too eager to cooperate with the hands which manipulate her as a new leather collar and cuffs are fitted, feeling light and elegant after the heavy steel ones she has worn forever, which have worn grooves into her flesh.
Her arms are folded up behind her, an almost otherworldly experience as she feels her arms moving as they should not be able to do, the palms of her hands meeting at the top of her back; the cuffs are linked together, a chain fixed to the linkage, then fed up through a ring at the back of her collar and dropped down behind her, before it is then passed forward through her thighs, pulled up tight into her sex lips, and then she is being led forward, each jerk on the chain first impacting on her sex as the chain tightens, then at her shoulders as her hands, in their unnatural position, are pulled upward. If she does not keep her hands high, her sex will suffer. She lets herself see how clever this cruelty is, makes herself take it as a compliment.
So much careful forethought, such specifics, in their cruelty.
Only she can hardly walk. It’s not that she is weak (although she does feel weak; light-headed, too), but that she has really forgotten how to walk. She is fearful that they’ll be cross with her, finds herself weakly making a stupid noise, the sort of noise she feels might deflect anger.
Giggling; I’m giggling. It’s a weak thing to do.
Another novelty, then; a bitter, dirty, gut-punch of shame as she realises, in the vaguest, most emotional of ways, something about the scale of harm that has been inflicted on her.
I … I gave myself away, didn’t I … and now … now, I’ve lost myself, and I have become pathetic; will always be pathetic; the most I have to look forward to is signs of attention when I’m being abused.
The sensation of hollowness in her threatened to overtake her, drown her, until it was itself pushed aside by a primal certainty, learned from the tank;
Anything is better than nothing. If being pathetic gets me this, then I will love it.
She concentrates on walking, on accepting— making herself value— the pain as the chain is pulled, hard against her clitoris, and at her shoulders, too; although her time in the tank has made her shoulders flexible, it has made her weak, and simply holding her hands high up behind her back is hard work.
Oh but I’m so grateful to be made to walk, to be allowed to walk, to be allowed to hear, for this new kind of pain and shame, too.
She is grateful, too, when they arrive at a door and it appears the journey is over; there’s a knocking, more hard-to-comprehend sounds and then, wonder of wonders, two hours of pure bliss, as she discovers that their destination is to whatever this place’ version of a beauty salon is.
Although she is manipulated, pulled and pushed, rather than spoken to politely, asked do you mind…? althoughb the blindfold is not removed, she is in heaven, compared to the world of the tank, as first her skin, then her hair, then her nails, then her make-up is attended to. That she is mostly kept in something like a gynaecologist’s inspection chair, strapped in, splayed open, naked throughout is hardly remarkable to her anymore; that her sex lips, nipples and lips are treated with some sort of stain more interesting than disturbing; it is all delight of an almost unbearable kind. Many times she has to work to hold back the tears.
The need to cry comes not only from the heartbreaking reality that, after the tank, even this most utilitarian of beauty treatments is overwhelmingly welcome, but from the other heartbreaking reality— that she is being beautified in order to be attractive to the sexual sadists, rapists and abusers to whom she has given herself; for whom she knows that she will do everything she can to encourage them to use her, since every second of abuse is a second not spent in the tank, not spent in a limbo worse than any imaginable Hell.
At the end, they do remove the blindlod, but only so that they can insert into both her eyes some soft contact lens which does, at last, allow her to experience light, but makes her eyes water furiously - she has never used contacts before.
At first, she assumes it is the tears which blur her vision, so, or that she has not used her eyes properly for so long, but after a while she realises that the lenses themselves are the cause. She can see light and dark, movements, outlines of people but no detail, none at all. More tears then, which she ruthlessly suppresses; any sight is better than the eternal dark…
And indeed when, after the unimaginable luxury of ten minutes alone, in comfort, her limbs not tied, not underwater, not being abused or manhandled, when they come to get her, when a pull at her collar tells her she must stand, as soon as she understands that whomever is pulling at her wants to re-establish the chain, she does everything she can to make herself easy to prepare, despite the shame of it. She walks as carefully, as beautifully as she can, but does not shy away from the vigorous tugs on the chain this new leader seems to enjoy— but rather lets the chain saw into her sex, lets him (she is sure it is a man) hear her pain, through soft, weak noises— not of complaint, but of suffering and weakness, as she been advised to do in so many of those hallucination /video sessions when the mask went clear.
Part of her hates herself for being so stupidly compliant, but a bigger part of her relishes and leans into the warm fuzzy feeling she gets at the notion she has given a man reason to believe she is vulnerable to him hurting her sex— that she has made it obvious to him that she is incapable of resistance— that should he wish to hurt her more, she will let him, help him abuse her.
When they stop, when he pushes her back against the wall and jabs three bunched fingers into her sex without warning or hesitation, she is treacherously pleased with herself (and, at a deeper level, horrified) to find herself moist there, that, despite the pain it causes her, she has been easy to penetrate, that her hips have moved, softly and eagerly, to spread, to welcome, to angle herself for his convenience, to find herself softly rocking her pelvis for him, to hear herself panting, finding it shamefully easy to reach a level of arousal which has her yearning to be penetrated, feel her nipples hardening, her belly quivering with need, and she advertises her arousal, her responsiveness, as she knows she must, with a soft and stuttering moan, wanting to show him that she appreciates his attentions, however brutish, offering herself to him in spite of the little surge of self-hatred that builds in her.
I’m a helpless whore; I must learn to inhabit this reality - learn to live as ‘warm wet holes and squishy mounds’. Be good at it, no matter the cost to my soul.
She doesn’t understand the words he says, but she can guess their import as the tone is compounded of grudging recognition, crude sneering and barely disguised lust.
Then the door is opened, and she is led into the room, hands high up behind her back, naked but for extreme high heels, the tight little corselette they had strapped her into, making her squeak, and her collar and cuffs.
She can feel the warmth of a fire, feel the presence of several people— male odours; she trembles, suddenly desperate, certain of some new outrage, helplessly hoping to be able to give pleasure; no matter how dreadful the shame, the cruelty.
This is it. This is me now; this is everything.
