The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

Thursday, January 27th

By the end of January he had a system, and the system frightened him because it worked.

It had started with the eggs and grown from there. Breakfast before her nine o’clock. Eight hours of sleep when she could manage them, seven when she couldn’t, and a text from him at eleven that said go to bed, which she answered and then obeyed. A real coat, bought in the second week of the cold, after he watched her cross the quad in a cardigan with the cuffs stretched to the shape of her thumbs. The gym twice a week, which she fought him on and then, to her visible disgust, began to like.

“Good subjects take care of the body they bring to trance,” he told her the first time he laid the whole regimen out, and meant it as a joke, and watched it land as a joke and as something else at once.

She did not go quiet under it, which was the thing he had braced for and did not get. She complained through every set. She negotiated. She sent him photographs of spitefully healthy dinners, a salmon fillet lit like a crime scene, captioned your subject has consumed one (1) protein under protest. Once, late, after the gym: master, the subject has slept eight hours and is suspicious of how good it feels.

He stopped at the word.

“Don’t call me that,” he said, the next time he saw her.

“Master?” She watched him like a sentence that was hiding something. “Too much?”

“Too. Something. It sounds like a costume.”

She thought about it. She was the only person he had ever met who actually thought about it, who treated the difference between two words as a thing worth getting right.

“Would you rather,” she said, slowly, “I said I was your good subject?”

It settled on the back of his neck like a hand. That one was theirs. It had no costume on it, clinical enough to deny and close enough to mean it.

“Yes,” he said, before he could decide not to.

She filed that away too. He saw her do it.

That night she sent him a photograph of herself in the new coat, navy, collar up, her face half in shadow, captioned the subject is warm. the subject resents being warm. the subject will allow it. He looked at it longer than he had looked at anything in a long time. He had set out to make her do things. He had ended up keeping her, fed and warm and sleeping.

The first thing the food took was the meanness. The girl who had called his candy a bribe and his reading undergraduate, who went for the throat whenever her blood sugar bottomed out, came back into focus around the third real breakfast. Fed and rested, she was no gentler on his arguments. She had only stopped picking fights with the room. He told himself this was just health. He suspected, underneath, that he had found a lever in her moods and liked the feel of it in his hand. He played coach and cook and hypnotist. The question of what the skipped meals had been holding down he left for a real doctor, someday, elsewhere.

— One More

He had not expected to be allowed to watch.

The gym in the basement of the science building was the one nobody used, two racks and a bench and a mirror gone foggy at the corners, and it smelled of rubber matting and old iron and the particular sweat of people who came there to be unobserved. She had fought him on the gym longer than on anything, and then one week she had texted him a time and the single word spot, and he had taken it for the permission it was and not pretended otherwise.

She lifted in an old shirt with the collar cut out and shorts that had stopped being baggy somewhere in January, her hair scraped back, her face already shining. There was nothing arranged about her here. In M-14 she sat folded and careful. On the bench she planted her feet and set her shoulders and made an ugly, honest face at the ceiling, and he found he could not look away from the ugliness of it, the effort with no audience in it, the body doing a true thing.

He loaded the bar as she told him to, because she knew the numbers and he had learned not to round them up. He stood at the head of the bench with his hands loose over the bar, close but not touching, and counted her reps in the low even voice he used for everything, and her breathing found the count as it had in the chair. He made himself not think about that.

Five. Six. On seven the bar slowed. On eight it stopped being a thing her arms were doing and became a thing the two of them were doing, the bar a half-inch off her chest and not moving, her whole body a held argument.

“I can’t,” she said, through her teeth.

“One more.”

“Daniel.”

“One more. I’ve got it if you don’t. You don’t have to make it. You have to try it.”

And she tried it. The bar shook. Her face went red and then a color past red, the tendons standing in her neck, a sound coming out of her he had never heard her make, low and furious and unembarrassed. The bar came up an inch. Stopped. Two inches. He kept his hands under it and did not take it, because taking it was the one thing she had not asked him for. It crawled. It locked out. She let it crash into the rack and lay there heaving, alive.

“I hate you,” she said to the ceiling, grinning.

She had failed the set, in the sense that mattered to no one but the body. She had also done a thing in front of him she could not have done in October, and they both knew it, and the knowledge heated him and brought the color up in her face. He had asked her body for one more than it had, and it had spent everything reaching. The set only counted from the one you wanted to quit on.

She sat up and shook out her arms, and he let himself look, openly: the new muscle standing in her shoulders, the sweat tracking down the side of her throat into the cut collar, the thighs that had a winter’s work in them now, the whole flushed steaming engine of her, pleased with itself. This was not the look he gave her in the dark. It had joy in it and nothing to apologize for, and watching her tip her head back and drink, her throat working, he understood that this was the one room where his attention had built her something she got to keep.

The showers were down the hall, single stalls with curtains that did not quite close, and she went pink when he followed her in, which delighted him, that she could put up more than her own bodyweight and still color at a door. The water ran loud and hot. She got clean under it, the salt going off her skin, the chalk off her hands, her hair slicking dark down her back.

And then she got dirty again, with the steam and the hot water and the new boldness the iron had put in her, and it was the one time it was simple between them, no chair, no cadence, no card, two tired bodies that had earned the right to be stupid about each other for ten minutes. She laughed when her elbow caught the soap dish. He laughed when he said the wrong thing. She was wet and slick and strong against the tile, and he followed her instructions here too, gladly.

Saturday, February 5th

They were a couple by February, in all the ordinary ways, and the ordinary ways were the ones that frightened him.

Because she would not simply be improved. He had half expected, somewhere he was ashamed of, that the training would smooth her, that a girl who did what he said about eggs and sleep would do what he said about everything. She did the opposite. The more he asked of her body, the more exact she became about which parts of it were his to ask after.

She would not run. She had tried it twice to please him and hated it with a specificity he found unanswerable: the jarring, the boredom, the way her own breath turned into a problem to be solved. She would swim instead, or row the machine while reading a paper propped against the console like a lunatic. She needed rice; a body doing this much, she told him, could not be run on leaves, and she was right, and he stopped suggesting salads. When he reached for her the night before a deadline she put a flat hand on his chest, not unkindly. “I have a paper due Thursday,” she said. “You may command my body after that.” She was joking. She was also completely serious. He learned the difference like you learn a language, late and with errors.

She was nobody’s, which should have settled something.

That was the part he could not get over, lying awake afterward doing the math of her. A puppet did not negotiate its own diet. A puppet did not table you until Thursday. Every boundary she drew was proof she belonged to herself, and he kept reaching for them like a man grabbing railings in the dark. Every one was solid. None of them was his. He lay between them and did not sleep.

— Kudampuli

He had told her to cook something from home.

It went into the regimen with the others, in the same flat voice he used for all of them. Eat breakfast. Sleep before two. Once a week, make something your mother would recognize. He told himself it belonged with the protein and the sleep, a nutritional instruction, and he was getting worse at the telling, because he had learned this winter that his care for her and his appetite for arranging her were one muscle, and he could not move the first without the second tightening somewhere out of sight.

She had resisted it longer than she resisted the others. Then on a Friday she texted him an address he already had and the words come at seven, bring nothing, and when he got to Rook House she was not in her room. She was down the hall in the communal kitchen the residents mostly used to reheat sad foil trays, a long fluorescent galley that smelled of other people’s microwave dinners and institutional bleach, and she had colonized one counter of it with a canvas bag and a focus he had never been allowed to watch before.

“You’re early,” she said, not looking up. “Sit there. Don’t help.”

He sat there. He did not help.

She had brought her own pot from her room, a dented steel thing, because the kitchen’s pots were wrong in some way she did not explain. She set a jar on the counter and unscrewed it and the smell of warm coconut oil came up, and he understood with a private shock that it was the same smell that lived in her hair on the weekends, the smell under the citrus, the one he had never placed. The oil went into the pot and loosened and began to shimmer. She dropped in a spoon of black mustard seeds and they cracked and jumped against the steel like something alarmed, a sound he felt in his teeth, and then she dropped a fistful of small dark leaves in after them and the leaves seized and spat and threw off a smell so sharp and green and resinous that the whole bleached galley changed its mind about what kind of room it was.

“Curry leaves,” she said, before he could ask. “Not curry powder. Different thing. Everyone gets it wrong.” She tipped her chin at the windowsill of her room, visible through the propped door, where a scraggly plant he had taken for decoration sat in a yogurt tub. “I keep it alive through the winter. It hates the winter. So do I.” She snapped two more leaves off a sprig and added them. “My mother mails me everything else. The leaves you can’t mail. They die in the envelope.”

He watched her hands. Shallots, small and purple, going translucent and then gold. Ginger in matchsticks. Garlic crushed under the flat of the knife with the heel of her hand, a quick violent motion that made him think, absurdly, that he had never once seen her be physically certain of anything before. She had always moved through the world apologizing for the space she took. Here she took the whole counter and did not apologize.

“What is it,” he asked. “The fish thing.”

“Meen curry. Nadan.” She said the second word and then translated it without being asked, as she translated everything for him, an ongoing labor he had stopped noticing she performed. “Country style. Home style. The way you’d make it if you weren’t trying to impress anyone.” She paused. “I’m not trying to impress you.”

“I know.”

“I’m doing it because you told me to.” She looked at him then, finally, over the steam, and there was the dry unsparing seminar face, except the steam had loosened the hair at her temples and her color was up from the heat and she did not look like she did in the seminar at all. “And because I wanted to. I can’t get the two apart anymore. I assume that pleases you.”

He had no answer that would not incriminate him, so he said nothing, which she had taught him was also an answer.

She soaked something in a steel bowl, a few dried pieces the color of old wood, shriveled, smoke-dark. The water under them went brown. “Kudampuli,” she said, lifting one for him to see and not letting him touch it. “Malabar tamarind. They dry it over a fire, so it tastes like sour and smoke at the same time. You can’t buy it here. This came from my mother’s tree, in a padded envelope, with two hundred rupees of postage and a note telling me to eat.” A short laugh that did not commit to being one. “Everyone in my family communicates through what they mail me. The shampoo. The puli. My grandmother once sent a fairness cream and a fish all in the same box.”

“A fairness cream.”

“To make me lighter.” She said it lightly, peeling the soaked fruit with her thumbnail, eyes down. “I was the dark one. There’s always a dark one. My cousin Anjali was fair and I was, the word they use is wheatish, when they’re being kind. My aunt used to hold my arm next to Anjali’s at weddings and sigh. My grandmother rubbed me with turmeric and gram flour every Sunday until I was twelve because somebody told her it would lift the color out.” She dropped the fruit into the pot. “It doesn’t, by the way. Nothing does. I still flinch in photographs.”

The pot had gone red now, the chili and the soaked puli and the coconut he had watched her grind to a paste with water in a little jar, and she laid the fish into it, frozen kingfish steaks she had apologized for once already because at home it would have been a pearl spot still wet from the backwater, and she lowered the heat and put a lid on it and there was suddenly nothing to do but wait, and she leaned against the counter and looked at him leaning against his, and the room was full of her mother’s tree and her grandmother’s hands and the smell of a coast he would never see.

“You look at me like the cream was wrong,” she said.

He chose the words carefully, because he could feel the trap, could feel that there was no clean place to stand. “I think you’re beautiful,” he said. “I’ve thought it since October.”

“I know you do.” She did not say it warmly. “That’s the part I can’t decide about. My whole family spent my childhood teaching me my skin was a problem to be managed. And then a white man looks at me like it’s the best thing in the room, and I’m supposed to feel rescued.” She turned the lid a quarter turn to let the steam out, a small competent motion. “But you don’t get to be the one who fixes it. You’re just the next person with an opinion about my color who happens to like this one better. I had to learn to stand the way I look without anybody’s vote. Yours included.”

It went into him as her corrections always did, lower than he was braced for. “That’s fair,” he said.

“It’s accurate. Fair is the word we’re retiring.” The driest version of the smile. “Eat with me. It’s done.”

She gave him a plate heaped with rice, red parboiled rice she’d cooked separate, and a ladle of the curry over it, and she gave herself a small amount, a careful amount, the ascetic amount he had spent a winter trying to argue her out of.

“More than that,” he said.

Her hand stopped over the pot, the ladle half-lifted. For a second neither of them moved. Then she put a second ladle on her plate. He had stopped being able to tell his kindnesses from his hungers, and now she had stopped too.

She ate with her right hand, mixing the rice and the curry to the right wetness, eating without performance, gone somewhere he was not invited. The taste arrived in him a beat after it must have arrived in her: the smoky sour of the puli first, then the slow build of the chili, then the coconut underneath holding all of it up, the curry leaf still bright in the back of it. It was the most alive thing he had eaten in years and he understood it was not for him. He was a guest in a room she had built before she ever met him, out of a tree and a coast and a grandmother’s cruel competent hands, and the only way he knew how to get near that room was to stand in the doorway and give instructions.

“My mother will want to match our charts,” Priya said, into her plate, in the tone of someone who has decided to say a thing while pretending it costs nothing. “When she finds out. Which she won’t, yet.” She licked the edge of her thumb. “Porutham. Two horoscopes, a man with a book, ten kinds of compatibility, a verdict on whether the stars allow it. You don’t have a chart. You have a birth certificate and a credit score.”

“Would she say no.”

“She’d say nothing, which is worse, and then she’d cry on the phone in Malayalam so I’d understand the feeling and not the words.” She set her spoon down. “It isn’t only the stars. A muhurtham, the right hour set by the astrologer. A temple. And the man ties a thread around your neck, the thali, a little gold thing, and the moment it’s knotted you’re married. A man putting something around your throat at the time another man chose.” She heard herself and stopped. Her hand went, without her seeming to notice, to the scarf she had left looped twice at her own throat over the apron, as she always wore it, as she had worn it the first night in the subject chair. If she connected the two, she did not show it. He did, and went quiet, and was glad the lid had something to do so he could look at it instead of at her.

“It sounds barbaric when I say it in English,” she said. “Most sacred things do.”

“Tell me one,” he said. “A good one.”

She thought about it. Outside the propped door the curry plant held its small green life against the window and the cold beyond it.

“Vishu,” she said. “New year, in April. There’s a thing called the Vishukkani. Kani means the first thing you see. The night before, my mother arranges a vessel in the prayer room. A lamp, rice, a gold coin, a cucumber, the yellow konna flowers that only bloom that one month, a little Krishna, a mirror so you see yourself in it too. And in the morning, before it’s light, she comes and wakes you with her hand over your eyes.” Priya put her own hand up, briefly, palm out, miming it. “And she walks you down the hall blind, with her hand on your face, and she only takes it away when you’re standing in front of the kani. So that the first thing your eyes land on in the whole new year is the thing she arranged for you to see. Because whatever you see first is what the year becomes.”

She laughed, and this time it committed, soft and embarrassed and entirely real. “It’s superstition. It’s completely mad. She still calls me at dawn their time every April to ask what I saw first, and if I tell her I saw my phone she’s devastated, so I lie. I tell her I saw a lamp.” She shook her head, fond, far away. “Nineteen years old, half a world from home, and I still let my mother put her hand over my eyes every April, because the alternative is breaking her heart over a flower.”

There was no radiator in this room, but he could hear one somewhere in the building, ticking down toward silence, and he sat very still with a plate going cold in front of him and the smoke of her mother’s tree in his mouth and saw it, all at once and too late to do anything graceful with it: he had spent an entire winter being her Vishukkani. That every Thursday he had arranged what she would see first. That the lowered voice and the cards and the green ghost of the words he never quite erased from the board were a hand laid over her eyes, walking her blind down a hall to the thing he had set out for her, so that whatever she saw first would become the year.

“What,” she said, watching his face do the thing it did.

He could have told her. There was a version of the evening where he told her, and it ended as the true things between them always threatened to end, with one of them having to leave the room.

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m trying to decide what I saw first this year.”

She smiled, because she heard it as romance, which it also was.

— The Seminar

He came to walk her to dinner on a Wednesday and got there early, and the seminar room door was propped open, and he stood in the hall where she couldn’t see him and listened to her take a boy apart.

The boy had said something safe about Rebecca, that it was a novel about jealousy, that Mrs. Danvers was the villain and the dead first wife the victim, the whole thing a study in obsession. A reading you could buy in a gift shop. Daniel, who had not read Rebecca and had only her of it, watched the back of her head go very still, as it went still in the chair, and then she said it, in the flat dry voice that dared the room to keep up.

“Mrs. Danvers isn’t the villain. Mrs. Danvers is the only honest person in the house. She loved a woman the house was built to forget, and she won’t let it forget, and we call that villainy because the alternative is itting the book agrees with her. If you need a villain, it’s the house. The house, and the second wife’s gratitude. Gratitude makes people easy to haunt. She is so grateful to have been chosen that she never once asks what she was chosen for, or who owned the room before her, or why the last tenant had to die for her to move in. That isn’t a love story. It’s a property transfer with a wedding in it.”

Somebody laughed, the nervous laugh of a person watching a thing get cleanly dismantled. The boy tried to find his way back in, and she gave him a foothold, exact but never cruel, one that cost her nothing and saved his afternoon.

Daniel stood in the hall with his coat over his arm and understood, not for the first time and never comfortably, that the girl who rehearsed her coffee order and apologized for taking up space and went soft and biddable the moment he lifted the cards was also this: a mind that could open a novel like a body on a table and name every organ in it. Then she gathered her books, and the bag dragged her shoulder down, and she came out into the hall and saw him and went shy again in a single breath.

— Reinforcement

“You make being overthought sound like an honors seminar,” she said.

By then Daniel had a theory of her pleasure, which was not the same as understanding it. He knew enough to distrust understanding.

They were in his room on Belden Street, his roommates gone to a Super Bowl party neither of them had wanted. He had changed the sheets that morning, cleared the laundry chair, bought the full-fat yogurt she liked. Priya had noticed all of it. She noticed everything now, or always had, and he was only beginning to understand the scale of her attention.

She was on his bed in one of his shirts, and her body had changed in the months he had been watching it. Where the thin girl of October had been all suggestion, this one had weight and shape and took up the room she was given, a power that looked entirely her own and that his notebook had no column for. He desired the evidence of it, the appetite and the sleep and the muscle and the color in her face after the gym, and he had given up talking himself out of the heat that came with the desiring.

He had trained her to care for herself, he thought. Then the thought turned over and would not turn back: maybe she had been training him the whole time.

She glanced at the index cards on his desk. “Are you going to use them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to confuse things.”

“Things are already confused.” Her bare foot moved under the blanket, brushing his thigh. Possibly accidental. He could never tell with her, which meant he could always tell exactly enough to be ruined.

“You think if you make me come while saying certain things, I’ll associate the pleasure with the things.” He looked away. “And it scares you because you think it would work.” A beat. “And it turns you on because you think it would work.”

He closed his eyes.

“What are the things,” she said, “that you’re afraid to say while making me feel good?”

He knew exactly. That she was safe. That she was his good subject. That eating was obedience and sleep was obedience and being touched with care was obedience too. That she chose this, that nothing happened that she did not allow. He said none of it.

“Say one,” she said.

“No.”

“All right.” She kissed him once, lightly. “Then don’t.” That was always how she defeated him: she withdrew the pressure and left him alone with the shape of his own want.

He touched her carefully, drew the borrowed shirt off her, and kissed his way down the changed body with one broad dark-haired hand flat on her belly to feel her breathe. He was attentive because he was terrified, and terror made him meticulous.

“Slower,” she said once. “Not like you’re defusing a bomb.” He laughed, helpless, and the laugh loosened the wire that had been strung tight between them all evening.

The first time she began to shake he almost stopped.

“Don’t,” she said. “I’ll tell you if I need you to stop.”

The sentence should have reassured him. Instead it opened the deeper terror: if she could tell him exactly what she needed, the obedience was fluency, and if he had taught her the language in which she asked, then what was the difference?

When he was inside her and release went through her, it did not look like surrender. That was what undid him. Her eyes opened at the last second, wide and startled, as if some hidden part of her had stepped forward and found him already watching, and for the length of that blink the startle had a floor under it, the steadiness of a person who had arranged to be found and was watching the arrangement work. Then her lashes came down and took it away, and he told himself the lamplight had done it.

He said it then. He had told himself he wouldn’t, and then he did.

“Good subject.”

The words were almost a whisper.

Priya’s body answered before either of them could decide what the answer meant. A second tremor, smaller, sharper, pulled through her and around him, her hand fisting in his hair, and the feel of her coming again at the sound of the phrase took him over the edge with her, helpless, on a pulse he had not decided to allow.

Daniel went cold with triumph and horror.

She was breathing hard. Her eyes were wet, though not with crying exactly. “Say that again.”

“I shouldn’t.”

“I didn’t ask whether you should.”

He stared at her.

He could not tell, looking at her, where her wanting ended and his instruction began. The difference should have mattered more than it did.

“Priya.”

“Say it again because I want it,” she said. Then, softer, “Or don’t, if you don’t.”

He could have chosen silence. He knew that. The possibility existed, intact and accusing.

He bent his head until his mouth was near her ear.

“Good subject.”

This time, when she shuddered, he understood nothing.

— The Archive

What he wanted was on the fourth floor of Alden, in the closed stacks, behind a door with a keypad and a sign-out sheet and a graduate-student gatekeeper who did not let undergraduates past the desk. A bound run of an 1880s journal of animal magnetism, the kind of thing he had only ever seen quoted, the whole genealogy of his bad hobby set in the original type. He had asked at the desk twice and been turned away twice.

Priya shelved up there on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She listened to him want the thing. Her eyes went middle-distance for a second, doing some arithmetic, and came back decided.

“Come back Thursday at four,” she said. “Wear a collared shirt and look bored.”

On Thursday she walked him past the desk like he belonged to her. “He’s with the Ilyin project,” she told the gatekeeper, a girl with a lanyard and a half-eaten granola bar going stale at her elbow, too sunk in her own midterm to look up, and produced a call number out of the air, and a professor’s name, and a deadline, and an exasperated joke about faculty who never came down themselves, all of it smooth, all of it false, all of it without a flicker. The gatekeeper waved them through. Priya signed a name that was not hers on the sheet and did not pause over the pen.

He had the journal for forty minutes. It was everything he had hoped, and he read almost none of it, because the whole time he was watching her pretend to shelve, and what he saw was this: back in the public stairwell, out of sight of the desk, the color climbed her throat and into her face, hard, the flush of a person who has gotten away with something and is sick over it.

“I hate doing that,” she said. Her hands were not quite steady. “Lying to Maya. She’s nice. She let me cry in the break room once.”

“You were perfect.”

“That’s the part I hate.” She would not look at him. “I’m bad at it. It costs me a fortune. I just don’t let it show until after.”

He told her she’d been brave, and meant it, and walked her down into the cold and bought her the cinnamon roll, and it was a long time, weeks, before the thing she had said arranged itself into a shape he could not set back down. That a clean lie to a kind stranger had cost her a fortune and left her shaking in a stairwell. And that nothing he had ever asked of her in M-14, not once, not any Thursday, the eyes closing on cue, the good subject going under, had ever cost her a thing that he had been able to see.

Friday, February 18th

He had a way of coming apart that only she had learned to stop.

It came on at night, mostly, after a good day: the better things were, the more certain he became that he had built the good out of something rotten. He would start doing the math again, the one with no answer, water and sun and the chair turned to face him, and his breathing would climb, and his hands would go to his hair, and Priya would put down whatever she was reading and wait for the right second as he had once waited for hers.

“Hey,” she would say. “You chose this. I chose this.” His own railing, handed back to him in her flat, certain voice. “Breathe first. Then decide whether you’re a monster. You always do it in the wrong order.”

It worked. That was the thing he did not look at directly. It worked as the cards had worked on her, the cadence dropping, the pauses set like steps going down, and his shoulders would come down half a beat before he told them to, and the panic would lose its grip finger by finger, and he would surface a little embarrassed and a little saved and call the whole thing love.

He did not notice when she had learned the voice, or what night it stopped being her quoting him and started being her using it. He only knew that somewhere in the winter the steady one in the room had stopped being reliably him, and that he went toward her low even voice now as her eyelids had once gone down on moment, a half-second early, before he had decided to.