The Girl That Corrupted Hadleyburg

"Man is born broken; he lives by mending."--George Vaillant

It was many years ago. We'd been playing hide and seek for a few weeks, and had reached that awkward place in a boy-girl friendship where one or the other has to risk an overture.

We hadn't talked about how we felt for each other, but we'd talked about everything else: childhood, and things we'd hoped for and things we'd lost. Whenever we were together we were always kinder and braver. Or rather, since we gave each other nothing to fear it was safe to speak truthfully. I remember thinking, "This is what it feels like to really be free."

When you feel like that around someone you have to find out whether she feels it too. If you don't you'll always regret it. But when you feel like that you already stand to lose something precious. And being aware of your predicament won't save you--far from it. So I tried to put it out of my mind. I just wanted to savor every day with her while it lasted.

But I knew things couldn't go on like that forever. One night I dreamt that a scary black cat was yowling on my back porch and I wouldn't let it in. I didn't want it, but it was mine. When I woke up I realized I'd been dreaming about her. That cat was getting hungry.

"I used to be very angry," she said one night not long after my dream. It was almost closing time. We'd hardly touched our beers. "Did you already know that?"

I nodded. "What was it like?"

"I think... I think I just felt broken and alone. And it was because of someone else. And I didn't think I would ever be right again. You know?"

I knew. "What changed?"

"Nothing. No one can feel like that forever. I remember thinking, 'I will never forget this.' But you do. I mean, you don't forget, but you choose not to remember. One day you find that you can do that, so that's what you do."

She paused for a moment, alone with her thoughts. Then she said, "Why are you so shy?"

I balked and she sipped her beer. "There's a story there too," I said. "Only I don't know how to tell it yet."

The truth was that my affection for her was so infused with admiration that I felt ashamed to make direct pass at her. And besides, I was afraid to upset the delicate emotional ecology we'd established.

Someone had left a keychain on the bar. It was a tiny toy robot attached to a ring with no keys. It had a little red LED bulb for a nose and a button on its back and when she pressed it, it flashed and wailed like a siren.

"Oh my god," I said, stunned by its tawdriness.

She giggled. "What is it for, do you think?"

I thought, there's a girl in a robot keychain sweatshop somewhere asking herself that same question.

"Maybe it's a mind control device," she said. She had a habit of inventing elaborate fanciful secret histories for everyday things. That sense of whimsy was one of the things I liked about her. It made her seem a little exotic. Any piece of litter on the street might be part of an elaborate Rube Goldberg device. And if a restaurant wasn't doing much business she'd say for sure it was really a money laundering operation. Sometimes she said she believed in magic. Tonight a keychain could control your mind.

"Think about it. You take it with you to the bar, find someone you like and zap them with it. After that they're your willing sex slave. Someone probably left it here by mistake. I'll bet he's at home right now fucking some poor girl senseless."

She slipped the keychain into her pocket. "Imagine how he'll freak out when he realizes it's missing and comes back and can't find it. I hope she was worth it."

"How do you know he's a he?" I said.

"Hmm," she said, raising an eyebrow, as though considering a new angle. "A girl could have fun with something like that."

"Do you read those kind of stories?" I said.

"Mm hmm."

"But aren't they always about some hideous creep using mind control to sleep with models or to make his wife do degrading things or something?"

"Sometimes," she said thoughtfully. "But I like some of them. Once I read one about a rich, eccentric inventor who lived in a mansion outside a small town."

"That's original."

She stuck her tongue out at me before continuing.

"He had built this elaborate mind control contraption that filled half a room and he used it to seduce nearly all the women from the town, one by one. They'd do all sorts of crazy things for him. He even persuaded them to recruit their friends to come see him.

He made them keep it a secret, but eventually their husbands figured out what was going on and a mob of angry men surrounded his mansion. They said if he didn't come out they'd force their way in and get him.

But the inventor thinks fast and offers to show them the machine first. And their curiosity gets the better of them. They want to see for themselves what power could enable this crazy old loon to seduce all of their wives."

She paused dramatically.

"And it turned out it was just a prop. He was just good at cold reading. He'd let them do whatever they wanted and then pretend that he was making them do it."

"But for that to work they'd have to know that he was trying to control them," I said.

"Yes, of course. That's why the machine was so big and impressive-looking."

"But if they knew about it, why didn't they just stay away?"

"He'd lure them to his mansion on some pretext and then spring the machine on them by surprise."

"But it's not a real mind control machine."

"Right."

"So why didn't they just leave?"

"Partly because they didn't believe they could, but mostly because they didn't really want to. That's the whole point of the story. The phony 'mind control machine' acted as a permission slip for the women to do the things they'd always wanted to do but had been embarrassed to try.

So the evil genius was vindicated. And so was the entire mind control genre. At the end of the story the townsfolk are all made to solemnly promise never to speak ill of mind control stories again."

"Why would they do that?"

"They lost a bet with the inventor."

I laughed. "That's a ridiculous story. What was it called?"

She paused for a beat and then with a perfect poker face she said, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg."

We had missed last call. The bar staff were placing upturned chairs on tables around us.

"Let's go to my place for a cup of coffee," she said.

"It's too late for coffee," I said, missing my cue.

"Well, let's go to my place for a glass of wine then," she said.

So we did. We were just inside the door when she said, "Come here," and pulled me towards her to plant a quick kiss. "I've been wanting to do that for a long time." She looked me straight in the eye. "Now don't hold back, okay? Here."

She fished in her pocket for the robot keychain, held it at arms length, made it flash and wail at her and then made a goofy wide-eyed face like a Halloween zombie.

"Now I'm yours," she said. "I'm at your mercy." Then she mock-swooned into my arms. As I held her close to me for the first time, a chill ran down my spine. I lifted her chin and kissed her again, deeply.

It was a simple game, a role play with no script or defined boundaries, whose only rule was that I couldn't ask for any. Like the con man in her story I'd have to anticipate what she'd most like to submit to. It was thrilling because, while it felt a little dangerous, it was also completely innocent, like when children fall backward and trust a friend to catch them. It filled me with desire and confidence, as if she were telling me, "Everything you want is right. I trust you and I want you to have it." It drew something out of me that I hadn't known was there.

"Stand up," I said, and she did.

"Turn around, slowly. Let me get good look at you."

I beamed at her. "Beautiful. Now expose yourself. Take your clothes off slowly, from top to bottom."

She blushed and cast her eyes demurely downward as she complied as slowly as she dared.

"Good. Now turn around again."

She was soft, with curves: big breasts, hips and thighs, not very tall, hair that just covered her ears. My bashfulness melted away as I became aware of her sexuality, then felt ashamed again for looking at her like that, and then remembered that permitting me look at her "like that" was exactly why she had proposed this game.

I took my own shirt off and moved up close beside her and kissed her ear and whispered: "You're at my mercy now."

I kissed and bit her neck. My lips and tongue and restless hands surveyed the rest of her body, exploring every surrendered recess. I took my time. I was possessive. She had offered her body to me and I wanted leave my mark on every part of it.

At last I thought of the perfect way to take her. I'd need a mirror.

"Close your eyes."

I took her hand and guided her into the bathroom and placed her hands on the ledge of the sink. I spotted a small nightlight in the wall outlet beside the mirror and turned it on. It glowed like a candle.

"Take a step back. Spread your feet. Perfect. Now lean forward."

I wrapped my arms around her to caress her breasts and held my head beside hers.

"Now open your eyes."

When our eyes met in the mirror's reflection and she smiled and blushed and craned her neck to kiss my lips I knew that I had induced the right balance of shame and tenderness.

I was already pressed up against her sex. Now I began to slowly make my way inside of her. It wasn't difficult; she was drenched.

The fiction of having power over her helped me to remain at once attentive yet detached. As I moved within her I focused on her hair and her neck. I watched her eyes and lips reflected in the mirror and studied every soft sigh and moan. I tried to become like a mirror myself, transparent and unobtrusive, apprehending everything, unchanging yet registering her every move. I knew that if I were to withdraw within myself and surrender to the experience, I wouldn't be able to stay with her until the end.

Her sighs began to take on a plaintiveness and urgency, as if she had reached a plateau and was straining to climb higher. She stayed on the edge like that for a long time, poised at a gate she was unable to enter.

Her face began to change, almost imperceptibly at first. Our eyes met again in the mirror. A single tear traced a path down her cheek like a raindrop on a windowpane.

In a moment we were sitting on her bed. She had turned away from me and hidden her face and wouldn't tell me why. I was troubled and perplexed, for I was too young then to know of the secret scars women bear. I reached out and held her as gently as I could, and then the floodgates really burst. Finally she sobbed "Does he even know what he's done to me?"

I felt powerless to help her--for the present is powerless to help the past. But I wanted at least to drink the cup of bitterness along with her. She'd been crying alone for too long.

I don't know how long the orgy of sadness lasted. But by degrees she regained her composure. Finally she whispered "It's not what you expected, is it?"

"No," I said.

She turned towards me and her eyes widened and her face became a little wild. "You must think I'm an awful tease."

"No," I said. I remember I was stroking her arm.

"It's okay. You can say it." I wouldn't say it. She spoke deliberately as if choosing her words from a bowl of alphabet soup. "Sometimes I don't want what I thought I wanted." She sighed heavily and her eyes teared up again. "But I shouldn't do that to boys, you know?"

Now I was about to cry. I kissed her.

"So I'm not a cold bitch?" she said.

In an instant I was ready to burst--who had dared to say that to her? I took her in my arms and I guess we kissed for as long as she had cried. That was all we did. Then she became sleepy, so we slept.

As I lay holding her in the dark, with the light of the streetlamp falling through cracks in the window blinds to glimmer across her cheek and neck and shoulders, and I smelled her hair, and felt her breathing, and felt myself, too, still hard against her hips, a thought gathered itself slowly. It was less a thought than a sensation that seemed to run like a current throughout my whole body. At first it was a formless sense of fatefulness, then a vague excitement verging on fear, until at last, trembling, I understood that really she had enchanted me, and not the other way 'round. Henceforth I was at her service, however she wanted, for as long as she wanted. Her splintered wing would set within the sling of my affection.