The Juliette Society

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.’

Isn’t it painful, I say.

‘Everyone has their limit,’ she says. ‘Mine’s pretty high. When I’m tied up, at first, I feel this tingling sensation all over my body, like an electrical current going through it. My fingers and toes slowly go numb from being so tightly constricted, then this intense burning heat spreads along my arms and legs. Just pain on pain. Until I can’t bear it any more. And the pain turns in on itself and turns into the most intense pleasure I’ve ever felt.

‘Everything becomes inverted. Pain becomes pleasure. Pleasure becomes pain. And I will do anything I can to increase it, to make sure it never ever stops, because it feels so good.

‘I’ve had the most intense orgasms I’ve ever had while tied up,’ Anna says. ‘Orgasms so intense I passed out, woke up still hanging there, and then the whole thing started all over again.’

She says you lose track of time so quickly when you’re suspended or restrained, like someone’s put you under hypnosis.

‘It’s like I’m in a trance,’ she says, ‘an erotic trance. Like I’ve been there for minutes, but it could be hours. I’m outside time and it all feels endless. And I’m afraid of what might happen when it does.’

It’s at that point, Anna says, caught between the fear of wanting and not wanting, that she feels she might go insane.

‘But I feel so alive,’ she says. ‘More alive than at any time in my life, and at peace. I feel transcendent.’

I’ve never heard Anna talk like this before. She’s normally so giggly and carefree. Now she’s serious and I can hear that she really means what she says.

I remember that look on Anna’s face. Now I understand what she was feeling. Now I want to know even more. I want to know what it feels like to be in Anna’s world.

Anna thinks she’s said enough. I know this because she trails off and goes strangely silent, then abruptly changes the subject.

She says, ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Not much,’ I say.

‘I want you to meet Bundy,’ she says, slightly mischievously.

‘Sure,’ I say.

And I don’t even give it a second thought. I know it’ll be a few hours at least before Jack gets home and I don’t want to sit here stewing all on my own.