Shadowed Soul (8 page)

“What about Bailey?  There’s more than enough room in the apartment for me and him!”

“He’s my seeing-eye dog, Thomas!” she sighed.  “I need him to get around.”

“He’s my friend!”

“I know and he still is and you’ll get to see him when you come to see me and Jonathan.”

“I’m going to be all alone!”

“I know that, Thomas, and I hate the idea,” she shook her head ashamed of herself for further enabling me and yet still full of love and compassion. “You could come and stay with us in the house though.”

“No, there’s not enough room!”

“We’ll make room.  Mom and Dad will be happy to have you there.”

“No, they won’t!” I said flatly, not really believing what I was saying but still convincing myself that it was true. “They never liked me, Beth.  They always just pretend for your sake, it’s obvious.  Listen, just go back to your parents and I’ll call you tomorrow!”

“Thomas, please, listen to me…”

The Shadowed Soul turned my body and mind away as my bus waded through a puddle to a stop.  Beth watched as I patted Bailey on the head.

“I’ll see you soon, Bailey,” I said then clambered somberly onto the bus as my wife stood in the rain, her face a study of misery and tears.  The bus pulled away and I stared ahead hating every single cell that was in my body.

How long the journey took I have no idea.  Mechanically, I changed buses, a broken robot that knew it had to get there and carried out the journey without a sense of purpose.  The decayed place I was going was no longer my home.  Devoid of all I had loved it was now a mere box for shelter.

Around 11L00 p.m., I reached the apartment.  Opening the door to the gaping chasm of dark abandonment was a trigger.  Behind me, the door shut; I leaned back as a plaintive wail escaped my chest.  I sank to my knees.  No warm friendly snout intruded on my grief. 

“Hello, Thomas!  Ready to play?”  Alone with the Shadowed Soul, inescapably isolated from the world, I headed to the kitchen for a drink.

“Fuck off!” I mumbled, shuddered and collapsed on the floor weeping.

By the time I looked up from my fetal position on the kitchen floor the clock on the wall indicated two hours had passed.  The Shadowed Soul was responsible for stealing time while robbing me of happiness.  Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I caught my reflection in the window as I stood up.  I should have gone to bed; I had work the next day.  But the idea of sleep seemed alien.  Dazed, I found myself in the living room seated at my computer typing in that familiar URL. 

“Why not raise the stakes, Thomas?” asked the Shadowed Soul mischievously taking over my keyboard. “Don’t be so dull, my friend.”  Before me a phrase appeared that I had never typed before.  “Thomas, don’t you know this is Viacom’s biggest line item.  They call it ‘Other’.  It’s their biggest money maker.  They just don’t mention to stock holders what ‘Other’ is composed of. 
The Journal
says so, Thomas, everyone’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it… Why not you?”  

The search engine seemed happy to provide infinite variations on this theme.  Over 90 million search results.  The Shadowed Soul clicked
Images
.  Mesmerized, I stared at the screen and descended far deeper than I had ever delved into a purgatory I had once escaped.  As I took those first steps it became clear that it was degradation I sought, there safe inside the bowels of my private hell.

“Zoom in!  What the hell?” encouraged the Shadowed Soul.  Enlarging the first image on my screen, a woman who looked very much like Miss Alaniz gazed hopelessly at me.  Her arms pulled savagely behind her, ropes bound her wrists together.  Her breasts were unencumbered, surrounded by bindings that held her arms to her body; her torso pushed ahead so that her shape was accentuated.  Her mouth was plugged with a black leather ball held in place with straps and her eyes looked pained and afraid.

With academic indifference I pondered the word
bondage
and gazed at the image, feeling an odd sense of camaraderie.  I too felt trapped and helpless like this pretty woman before me.  Though clearly nobody’s friend, surely, she was somebody’s daughter.  As the millions of pixels on my screen competed to convey her horror, I felt my lower regions beginning to shift against my boxer shorts.  Within moments, the chemical change in me took place as I side-stepped from ascetic to primitive.  Arousal and self-hatred amplified in a sickening contra-dance.

I did not attempt to fathom my reasons for searching out
BDSM
.  In the past I had been content to look at standard pornography or
Playboy
.  Even
Victoria’s Secret
lingerie catalogue worked for me.  Clean, pretty curves and alluring bedroom eyes delivered fantasies of love and ecstasy.  But now I was treading in a cruel, unhealthy wasteland.  Until now, I had never entertained a desire to see a woman bound and gagged.  That it was turning me on disgusted me.  It had been years since I had looked and I trembled with anxiety and excitement.  This was my second night in a row looking at internet pornography.  I was pushing the envelope beyond the simple peep-show thrills I had explored in my late teens.

“Come here!” yelled my mother from the living room as I had entered the house bee-lining to my bedroom. Her voice was loaded with rage that gave me a dead lump of anxiety.  Normally, she barely noticed my movements. “Thomas, I said come here!  Now!”

It dawned on me it had been at least three weeks since I had even been in her presence.  Her usual distance was now engaged fury as my mother sat in her chair, clutching her walking stick in one hand and sheets of paper in the other.

“What is it, mom?” I asked diplomatically.

“As if you don’t know, Thomas,” she fired back.  “How did I raise you?  Did I raise you to be a filthy pervert?”  My heart sank in my chest.  She had been on my computer.  “I’m waiting for an answer!  The filthy shit you’ve been looking at up there every night!”  She glared at me as if daring me to deny it.

“You shouldn’t be on my comp--”

“My son, the filthy pervert!  What makes you look at these whores?  Is it because you can’t get a real woman?” she sneered.

“It’s my computer, mom.  You should stay off of it!” I attempted, but my voice shook.

“I will not have this filth and depravity under my roof!”

“It’s my room!  I pay rent!” I shouted defensively.

“It’s my house!” she hissed.

“I’m going to my room!” I shot back. “And, I getting a lock put on
my
door!”  Then my mother smiled at me.  Her smile had confused me. 

This had been our longest conversation in two years.  I climbed the stairs and opened my door then understood her smile.

On my desk, where my computer had been was a raw tangle of wires.  I clenched my fists in murderous rage.  Why would she even think that I would accept this?  I had paid for that computer and I paid for internet access.  I worked hard to do that.  I paid her rent.  I bought my own food and clothes and for her to have come into my room and steal my stuff was not acceptable!

“I got Mr. Wilkes to put it on his fire!” she hollered up.  I kicked my door shut and fell onto my bed, almost nineteen years old yet so infantile.

I needed that computer.  I needed it for my studies.  I needed the fucking pornography that helped me escape from the shit that was my life!  I had needed it since I had been laughed at by a girl I had asked out to senior prom.  My humiliation had been enough to drive me to other means of gaining relief.  And now that hateful woman had stolen it from me!

I cried into my pillow like a little boy, then got up and packed my bags.  Not that she even tried to stop me, I left my childhood home.  Out into the cold night I realized that was the end of one life and the beginning of my next. As I wandered the streets with my meagre possessions in a battered suitcase, the Shadowed Soul had capered in the darkness around me.  Climbing up my back, he laced his grimy fingers around my throat tight enough to constrict my breathing.

“Get off me!”

“We can be together now, just you and I,” he crooned.  His spittle coated my cheek as he laughed at my misfortune.  Trapped again, I was merely driftwood for his hateful fire.

“I don’t need that bitch,” I told myself, and the Shadowed Soul nodded agreement.

That had all been a long time ago.  That break from the shackles of my childhood had, for a time, broken my access to the internet, and gradually, without access, too, my addiction to porn had been forced to wither.  But now, years later, even as a new father, I downloaded another image as my Shadowed Soul escorted a teenage me into the stark light of my computer screen.  This time, a naked woman with her ankles bound to her wrists appeared before me.  Packing tape hid her mouth and tears streamed from her eyes.

“There’s more, Thomas, so much more,” the curdled voice of my shady companion reminded me.  Immersed in a cesspool of violent images against this woman on my screen, I determined to obliterate myself by soaking in her pain, breathing in her fear, drinking in her powerlessness.  My arousal turned briefly to nausea, but then returned as the Shadowed Soul intensified the screen violence. “Let’s just turn up the volume, Thomas.  Wouldn’t want you to miss out on anything.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Blinking, my eyes hot and sore, I read the clock:  5:00 a.m.  There was no sign of my tormentor.  For a blissful moment I thought Beth, Jonathan and Bailey were here in the apartment with me.  Then reality registered; I was alone.  I had been immersed in dizzying porn for nearly six hours.  The realization was sickening.  My screen bore yet another image of a naked woman bound, gagged and exposed.  Like me, she had been reduced to something that was less than human.  I opened up my download folder. 

“What the--?”  Aghast, my palm pressed against my forehead.  To my horror I had downloaded nearly 500 images.  I had no recollection of it.  As I briefly scanned the thumbnails my stomach churned as I recognized how far my mind had sunk.  While the first three or four hundred were of women who resembled my former teacher, my search had modified as the night progressed and toward dawn all resembled my wife.

The collection of images contained women under duress. Each was restrained, bound with ropes or chains or straps.  Each one was silenced with a gag, eyes wide, pleading release.  Clearly these women were not enjoying captivity.  Why did I find release in this fulsome subculture when I had never before required such an extreme in order to feel free of my own emotional bondage? Logically part of me understood that many of the shots were hired models and the look of fear in their eyes was a paid act.  Maybe at break time while they picked out their next erotic outfit, they laughed hysterically with the cameraman who praised them for having really nailed
the look
.  But there were some sites that contained images that could have been real, ones in which no fancy buffed leather or glittery rhinestone collars were worn, ones in which girls too young to choose a profession were bound in filthy basements or cement slab warehouses where no one could hear their cries.  Faces from a milk carton:  It rankled that these were possibly real victims of inhuman men whose car trunks were stuffed with hemp and gags in burlap sacks.  In my depraved state, the idea of extreme helplessness eroticized it for me more so than the work-for-hire bling.

I had to be at work in a few hours.  Going to bed now would be worse than having no sleep at all.  I consigned all the shots to my trash bin then made coffee.  Sunrise caressed the cityscape as I sipped, staring out to marvel at the hunkered magnificence of New York City.  For some it would be a day of joy, light and promotions but for many others it would be a painful plod till sleep erased their pointless existence.  Life was not easy for most people.  In my depressed state, it seemed to me humanity collectively existed to suffer through vast wastelands.  Impenetrable obstacles blocked everyone.  How did anything get built?  How did any system manage to work?  Somehow the subways ran and the light switch brought light. There were only a few wily individuals who somehow got beyond the wasteland; they controlled the systems; they were the happy ones.  Since the onset of my condition, I believed I was destined to remain in my isolated tundra, struggling against unfathomed obstacles.  Had it not been for Beth and Bailey I would surely have allowed myself to lapse into a continuous series of emotional implosions and eventual death.  I knew that there were those, like my mother, who saw depression as a weakness in character and spirit.  Judgmental at best, they had little compassion for those who were under the grip of a Shadowed Soul.  To me,
cheer up and pull yourself together!
was like an amputee hearing
grow a limb already!
  Apart from being insulting, this lack of comprehension further marginalized people like me.  This simplistic view of my stultifying illness left me feeling guilty and incompetent for not being able to deal with it alone.  My abandonment issues were further exacerbated by a society that flatly rejected me.  Set adrift from the norm, I found it impossible to convey fully how devoid of warmth my world felt.  Throughout history people have suffered with depression.  How did they manage?  I have the luxury to live in an era when the world is more connected than ever.  I can talk instantly to people all over the globe if I choose.  With that opening of the internet that allows me to share thoughts and ideas, it seems to me that the world has become even more isolated.  With the immediacy of technology, email, Facebook, texting, tweeting, IM and Skype, I would easily be judged as a freak by people in places that I have never and shall never visit.  The sporadic negativity that I felt at an early age now became viral, instant, and exponentially more painful.

Manhattan grew brighter and bleaker through my grubby kitchen window as I choked down a second cup of coffee.  I wished I could remove myself and my few loved ones from this confounding algorithm that chronically equalled hardship.  Assailed by a kinetoscope of women in bondage, longing for escape, begging for rescue, and I felt again like a bastard.  As I placed my cup in the sink alongside the dinner plate I cracked the night before, I noticed Bailey’s food and water bowls.  They rested on a plastic mat we had bought to protect the floor from the shrapnel of his over-enthusiastic eating.  One bowl bore a cartoon dog with a big smile.  The sight stuck me in the heart like a rusty spike.  I needed my wellspring, my wife, my son, my dog.  I could not do this alone.  I needed their warmth and compassion.  I decided to return to them this evening as soon as I finished work.  And if the offer that I stay with them was there then I would snap at it, receive it in my arms and embrace the light that they provided.