The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Thursday, October 21st

You can feel lonely in M-14 with four other people in the room. Failing in front of them helps.

Daniel read off the top card, his voice catching and then steadying as it found the script. “In a moment I’ll ask you to — to clasp your hands together. Tight. Fingers laced. And when you do, they’ll feel... stuck. Glued. And the harder you try to pull them apart, the more stuck they get. Ready? Clasp them now.”

Four pairs of hands came together. Marcus’s came apart again almost at once, and he shook them out like he’d touched something hot, then went back to gnawing the cuff of a hoodie he had already chewed to a wet gray rope. Becca laced hers, let out the too-loud giggle she always smothered a beat too late, and let them swim loose, a friendship bracelet sliding down her wrist. Jonah didn’t clasp so much as hold the pose, cap on backwards, one knee jackhammering under the desk, smirking, daring the glue to find him.

Priya’s hands stayed locked.

Not at once. There was a fractional delay first, a beat in which her fingers seemed to decide, and then they were locked and stayed locked while he counted and the others watched their own hands do nothing. He ed the delay and filed it, instantly, under rapport. He went on down the card anyway, magnetic fingers, finger fascination, each convincer falling flat on everyone but her, and he told himself the unevenness was ordinary, that suggestibility varied, that it was in the literature.

“Okay. You can let them go.”

Priya flexed her fingers once, slow, and looked at them as if they’d done something to her. “Interesting,” she said.

The others were already standing, already onto the weekend. She didn’t move. She waited until the door had swallowed the last of them and the radiator had the room back. When she spoke, her voice came out smaller than the face she had arranged for it, and the color climbed hard into her cheeks.

“Does it ever work better one-on-one?”

Should he have said no?

“Sometimes,” he said.

M-14 had four chairs, a radiator that hissed like something holding its breath, and a bowl of fun-size candy from a previous Halloween that nobody touched. The bakery box was his own addition, started the second week: donuts and the big knotted cinnamon rolls with the icing going to glass in the cold, because people came back to a room with food in it, and he needed them to come back. Daniel got there early to arrange it, which mostly meant turning the subject chair to face his own and then standing back to see whether that looked overly arranged.

He wrote the heading on the whiteboard as he did every Thursday, around the faint green ghost no one had ever fully erased, the words placebo effects that a teaching assistant had written with the wrong marker last spring and that had survived every cleaning. CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES GROUP, he wrote, which was the name on the student-activities roster, an informal reading circle he had started and still ran, meant to be a different corner of the mind each week: attention, illusion, dreaming, the placebo, the questions that had pulled him sideways out of physics. He had steered it, instead, toward the one corner that let him stand at the front and have people do what he said. Under the heading he wrote the week’s subject, the same word it had been for a while now. SUGGESTION. Then the word that everyone agreed should be front and center: CONSENT. The marker squeaked. He looked at it there in capitals and didn’t like it. It read less like a welcome than like an accusation, a word that prevented what it was supposed to enable. He wiped it with the side of his hand and wrote it again, smaller, lowercase, tucked into the middle of a sentence where it could for ordinary. Always request consent. Better. An ask, not an obstacle.

The cards were rubber-banded in his shirt pocket. The top one had gone soft at the corner where his thumb had worried it for three weeks. He read from them because reading kept his hands from doing anything else, and his hands, left to themselves, did plenty. They were big and dark, hair to the second knuckle of every finger and up the back of the wrist into the cuff, his father’s hands and his grandfather’s, and when he forgot them they talked, shaping the air as his family shaped it around a table, a whole second language he had spent adolescence learning to fold into his pockets. In M-14 the cards held them, and that was one more thing the cards were for.

He was a person things happened to and not, anywhere else, a person things happened because of. He was twenty-three, tall in a way that apologizes for itself, folding into chairs, angling sideways through doorways, a boy professors called you, in the back on the rare days they called on him at all. Girls were kind to him like you are kind to a tall lamp you keep failing to see. The one person who had ever looked straight at him had died that June, in the house off Atwells Avenue. He had found exactly one room in the world where, for an hour on Thursdays, people did what he said, and he had built it himself, out of index cards and borrowed sentences.

They came in twos and drifted off. A cognitive-science minor, a girl who wanted something for the paper, a boy who left at the break. Every week, Priya, the comp-lit sophomore, sat with her coat off and her scarf looped twice at her throat, as if she might need to leave in a hurry, and watched him. He had set her chair to face his.

The box was the one thing in the room she touched, and barely. Once a session, never at the start, she broke a corner off one of the cinnamon rolls, a piece a bird would have been embarrassed by, made it last the whole hour, and left the rest pulled apart on a napkin, uneaten and somehow on display. To him her thinness looked untended, a girl nobody had been feeding, and it pulled at something in him older than want. He came from people who read a refused plate as a small wound and an unfed girl as a job, and he watched how little she let herself have with an attention that had nothing clinical in it. The reading was his family’s and he took it whole. That she might be keeping herself small on purpose, the way he kept his hands folded away, was a thought he walked past.

He kept a notebook for the group. He wrote careful, clinical things in it, and about her he had written nothing at all.

Thursday, October 28th

The first time it was only the two of them, he set the chairs facing as the cards instructed, close, and then slid his own back six inches because the closeness embarrassed him.

She took her coat off but left the scarf, looped twice. She sat, knees together, hands folded, chin a little down, the posture of someone afraid to be called on even though she knows the answer.

He let himself look at her, which was what he had really set the chairs up for. She had a wide, expressive mouth and a habit of holding the lower lip in her teeth when she thought, so it was often marked when she let it go, a pale dent slow to fill back in. Dark eyes under straight heavy brows, set in a brown face that ran hot with everything she felt: the contempt for a lazy sentence, the delight she was embarrassed to be caught in, the quick private verdicts crossing it like weather over water. He took it for the most legible face he had ever met, and read it like a tourist reads a city, the big easy signs and none of the private streets. The surface he could manage: the irritation, the boredom, the pleasure she did not trouble to hide. What moved under that surfaced only in flashes, behind the eyes, gone before he could hold it, and he let each one go, because catching it would have meant itting there was someone in the chair he had not put there.

“Before we start, I want to — there are things I should say first.” He had rehearsed this more than the induction itself, which did not seem to help. “I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. It isn’t mind control, it’s — it’s relaxation and suggestion and attention, and you’re in charge of all three the whole way through. If you want to stop, you say lantern. Not stop, because people say stop without... without meaning it. Lantern, and the lights come on. Okay?“

“Lantern,” she said, weighing it.

“And one more thing.” He turned the top card face-down. The line was there in the margin, in smaller print, underlined twice, found on an ethics handout and then almost word for word on a forum he knew he should have closed and didn’t, copied out in his own hand so it would sound like his and not like a thing he had taken. “You chose to come here. You chose this. Nothing happens that you don’t allow.”

He watched her take it in and could not tell, then or ever, which part of it she was hearing.

“I like that,” she said.

“What?”

“That it’s still my choice.” She looked at her folded hands. “Even the relaxed part. It’s still me.”

“It’s still you,” he said, and believed it.

Then he picked the cards back up, because his hands had started again and reading steadied them. She had gone still and ready before he asked her to, a half-step ahead of his instruction to do so, and the readiness of it steadied him more than the cards did, though he wondered how she always managed to be there first.

“Find a point on the wall. A little — a little above your eyeline, so your eyes have to work to hold it.” She chose the place over his shoulder where the green marker had ghosted into the board, the placebo effects that never fully erased. “Good. You don’t have to do anything with it. You don’t have to relax, you don’t have to listen, you don’t even have to believe me. Your only job is to hold that one spot and let everything else be as easy as it wants to be.“

The radiator hissed, and he let it. He had read, in a chapter meant for people with more training than he had, that the body lets go on the out-breath and not the in, and so he watched the rise and fall of the scarf at her throat until he had the rhythm of her, and began to lay the heavy words down only on her exhales.

“You can hear the radiator.” Out-breath. “You can feel the chair under you, holding all your weight so you don’t have to. You can feel the cold coming off the window, and your hands in your lap, and the small ache already starting in eyes that are working so hard to hold one spot.” All of it true, all of it things she could check and find true, and he watched her check them, the small settling of a person agreeing with the floor under her feet. “And while every bit of that stays true, the lids holding the spot get heavier, and in a moment they are going to want to close.”

They closed on the word moment, a beat too soon, and her lips shaped a small sorry.

“There’s no rush,” he said, too fast, and not sure, even as he said it, that it was true. “You can take this at your own pace. There’s no wrong way to do it. Open them, though, and hold the spot a little longer, until holding it is more work than letting it go.” She opened them, and the strain came back, the water standing along the lower lids, the blinks coming faster. “Good. With every breath out the lids get heavier, and by the time I reach ten they can close for good, and when they do you’ll be twice as relaxed as you are now, and you will know it. One.” He waited for the exhale. “Your shoulders come down.”

Her shoulders came down and her neck lengthened under the scarf. He noticed. He kept reading.

“Two, and the muscles around the eyes give up the fight. Three. The eyes can close now, if they want to.” They closed, and stayed closed. “Four. Whatever the dark behind them is doing, you can let it. Five, and the jaw comes unhooked, the tongue goes soft behind the teeth, the throat opens. Six.”

He moved the heaviness down through her as the card laid it out, slow, a place at a time, and she went with it ahead of him each time, half a step, her body anticipating each suggestion’s completion, rushing to relax like a student who answers before the question is out. Shoulders, then the upper arms, then the forearms, then the hands, until he could have told her the hands were full of warm sand and found them already holding it that way.

“Seven.” He took the seven as he said it, lifted it clean from the row, so that the next time she counted anything she would step over the gap and feel only a small absence where it had been. After the weight came the warmth, as the second exercise promised, a warmth he walked down the arms and pooled in the palms, and a color rose in her face that was the warmth, or the room, or something he had agreed with himself not to look at.

“Eight. Heavier and warmer and farther off. Nine. You don’t have to hold any of it up anymore. There is nothing in this room you have to do, and nothing here that isn’t yours to end. Ten. All the way down.”

By ten she had sunk boneless into the chair, and somewhere on the way her eyelids fluttered under, once, a fast soft tremor, almost a peek, as if she’d glanced out at him on the descent or momentarily resisted rather than running ahead.

She was relaxed but he was tense, and he gave her the harmless things first, because harmless was the one rule he could still keep. A right hand gone too heavy to lift until the count of three. A good feeling with no reason fastened to it, set to arrive tomorrow for no cause she would be able to name. Small kindnesses, the kind you could do for a sleeping person and not be ashamed.

Then, because the room was warm and she was so still and no one would ever hear the cards but him, he gave her one that was merely innocuous. She would sleep well tonight, and wake rested, and find the day a little easier to walk into. A doctor would say as much.

Then he gave her one he had to look up from the card to give, and told himself even as it left him that it was only rapport, only the working alliance the chapter named, the thing every practitioner built. You trust me. You feel safe here, doing this, with me. You enjoy it, going under, being relaxed with me. He heard himself lean on the words, press them a half-ounce too hard. The card said with. His mouth, running a beat ahead of his judgment, said learning from me. Learning to go a little deeper each time, for me. He did not take it back. The not-taking-it-back went warm all the way down his spine.

He said it once more, because saying it again was the part he had wanted from the start. You trust me. This is good for you. You like how good a subject you are. And the corner of her mouth moved, the smallest thing, there and gone, and his heart went cold, because for one instant it looked exactly like a person hearing a man overplay his hand.

But she was under. He had put her under himself, ten slow counts and a seven lifted clean out of the middle, and a girl who was genuinely under could not be lying there cataloguing the man who put her there. So it was nothing. A muscle, a dream twitch, a trick of the fluorescent light. He let his pulse come down and did not write any of it in the notebook.

His hand came up on its own toward her forehead. He wanted to place his fingertip on the warm place between her eyebrows and say deeper, to feel for himself the thing the cards could only describe. He got within an inch of her skin, felt the heat come off it, and pulled back as though the inch were a live wire. He put the hand in his pocket and read the rest off the card, where his hands could be trusted.

He should have felt like a fraud. He did not feel like a fraud now. He felt the floor of his stomach go as it had at the top of every first hill, the awful joy of a sharp, guarded girl gone still and soft because he’d asked her to. It was the only authority anyone had ever handed him, and it did not occur to him, sitting there drunk on it, to worry about that.

“When I say three you’ll — you’ll come up, rested. One. Two. Three.” Her eyes opened, clear, already on him, finding his face first thing, hunting it for how she’d done. No swim to them at all. He filed it under deep.

She held the rested look a moment. Then, almost under the radiator: “How did I do?”

“You were a good subject,” he said.

She colored, a slow warmth climbing her throat into her face. Half a second before it reached her cheeks her eyes came up and checked his, fast, like you check whether a stone you threw has hit, and then the color caught up and covered the look, and he read only the color. There was no suggestion in the world that explained a blush, or there was every suggestion in the world, and he carried the question out into the cold and turned it over the whole walk home and did not solve it, because he was already inside it.

That night he wrote in the notebook: Subject 3, P.N. High responsiveness, no complications. He did not write that he had been afraid to look at her once the trance had worn off.