Carrie's Story Page 16

  Just then a man dressed as a waiter thrust a tray of refreshments at me. “The table by the lemon tree,” he said, and I hurried over. I was a part of it now and I was determined to do it right. Don’t spill a drop, I told myself. Stand straight and never mind that they are clothed and powerful and you are naked and totally at their mercy. And if you can feel your breasts bounce a little, and you can feel their eyes upon you…well, just don’t spill a drop of these refreshments you are carrying to these frightening people in this beautiful, demonic place. I was at the table now.

  “The ices?” I asked politely, holding up the delicate goblet. A pretty young woman with short black curls and pink-and-white porcelain skin smiled and nodded. So far so good. “Beer?” I continued. Same with the thickset older man with the graying hair and beard. The tea went to the tall, angular man with the shaved head. I put it down in front of him and was preparing to nod politely and withdraw when he reached a large hand behind me and grabbed a big chunk of my ass. Which was quite painful, as you can imagine, given the beating less than an hour ago. I tried not to show it.

  “I like it,” the bald man said, “when I can get a lot of an ass into my hand. And I like the feel of this one. Welts, too. Perhaps she’s been naughty, or more likely somebody just thought she’d be more provocative this way. What do you think, Francis, Chloe?” And to me he said roughly, “Turn around for the lady and gentleman, you.”

  I held the tray in front of me and slowly turned my back to the table. “Bend over,” the bald man said, moving his heavy hand to the small of my back and pressing. I bowed at the waist, keeping my back straight, letting them have a good look at Paul’s handiwork. I felt like a baboon, presenting my decorated ass to them, and tried to console myself by bowing as gracefully as I could, stretching my hamstring muscles as though I were at ballet class. I felt grateful that I didn’t have to look these people.

  Francis, the bearded man, sounded a bit bored. “Is it necessary, André,” he asked, “to encourage Chloe this way?” And to Chloe, he asked, “Well, are you satisfied, now that you’re here?”

  She spoke softly, but very clearly, and I could tell that she didn’t need the least encouragement. “Yes, Francis,” she said, “it’s as interesting as I expected. And I don’t think she’s been a naughty girl. I think André is right and somebody thought she’d be improved by those marks. Send her over to me, André.”

  “Call her yourself,” he returned shortly.

  “You,” she said, “slave, put down that tray and come over here immediately and face me.”

  I walked over, my eyes down. She spanked my breasts a little with the cold bottom of her spoon. “Too small for you, Francis,” she said. “I suppose André and I are just wasting your time with this one.”

  He nodded, and in fact he was looking across the field, some bigger ones having doubtless caught his eye. “Why don’t I meet you two in a hour?” he said. “I’ll tell that waiter up there to turn her little bracelet off for a while.”

  Thanks, Francis, I thought, as he hurried off. André took a leash out of his pocket and handed it to Chloe, and she attached it to my collar. “What would you think,” she said, “a little jeweled collar, painted toenails, nipples gilded to match? Maybe powder blue, hmmm? And a pretty little kennel for her to crawl into. It’s sweet, isn’t it, that little bit of sadness about her.”

  “But it’s too bad,” she continued, “that we’re not allowed to make her even sadder. Why can’t we whip her, or at least watch somebody do it?”

  “Be logical,” he answered, “with the crowd that’s out to buy this week, she’d be hamburger by the time of the auction. But it’s still fun, isn’t it, to see her working to control her humiliation. I always enjoy that part.”

  And I was blushing rather furiously. I think it was the painted toenails, the idea of being her pet in a jeweled collar. She pushed me to my knees. “Now follow me on all fours,” she said. “André,” she added, “are you really going to walk behind us in that ridiculous way?”

  “Just, you know, to make sure she holds herself well,” he mumbled, his eyes, no doubt, on my welted ass.

  The tiled walkway was hard, cold, and smooth under my knees and the palms of my hands. She led me around the little artificial lake, stopping once or twice to talk to friends or acquaintances who also had slaves in tow. Finally she sat down on a bench by the lake, where it was fed by a little waterfall. “Drink,” she said, and I lapped some water.

  “And now eat,” she said, raising her skirt, showing me a dazzling white shaved cunt, surrounded by intricate black garters and stockings. I entered her with my tongue, while she kept a tight hand on my leash. I heard her groan softly, as I licked all around, returning often to her clitoris, but circling and teasing as well.

  And I wasn’t entirely surprised to feel André entering my asshole, his big hands on my breasts. I tried to cry out, but Chloe kept my head buried in her. So I just gave in to their rhythms, his pushing and her pulling, and me trying to be as active and passive as it all demanded, until finally they both came and leaned over me to kiss each other hungrily.

  “We’ll try a boy next,” he murmured to her sleepily, “a very pretty little one.” Since she’d unsnapped my collar, I guessed I was dismissed.

  As I scrambled to my feet, I noticed a man alone on a bench halfway around the little lake. He was looking through some papers, which seemed like an odd thing to be doing in the Garden, but it still seemed to me that he’d been watching me with André and Chloe. I don’t know how I knew that, or what exactly I had even sensed, besides a vector of attention and a quality of stillness. I turned and looked at him for a moment, though all I could really catch was the glint of dark-tinted glasses. And then I remembered to lower my eyes, and I felt a pinprick at my wrist. Fuzzy logic kicking in again, I thought, as I hurried to the Argus.

  The screen directed me back to my room, where a maid cleaned me up and gave me some lunch. Then I napped for an hour or so, before my bracelet led me to the gym. My punishment signs were dangling from my collar again. I waved my bracelet at the Argus, and a nearby printer started spitting out paper with information about me, so that the trainer who took charge of me knew what program to set me on, how many minutes of stretches, StairMaster, free weights.

  Margot was right; it was all very businesslike. Just like a downtown yuppie gym, except that nobody was using a Walkman—they piped in some dreary upbeat Europop instead. And, of course, not to forget that everybody using the machines or the weights or the mats was a naked slave, cuffed, collared, and coded into the system. A few, like me, wore little placards announcing that they were scheduled for punishment that evening and telling anybody who was interested the nature of the transgression. Mine were pretty typical, though I also saw UNDISCIPLINED GAZE and, most provocatively, WILLFULLY DISOBEDIENT. This last one fascinated me. It hung from the collar of a tall boy using a Nautilus machine. He had very strong, beautiful thighs, the kind where there are muscles peeking out from under the muscles you can see. His long black hair was bound at the neck. I wondered what you had to do to merit WILLFULLY DISOBEDIENT, instead of just DISOBEDIENT, or my own wimpy SLOW TO OBEY/TALKED OUT OF TURN. If you’d gotten this far, why would you purposely disobey, and what exactly had tipped the balance to WILLFUL? I wondered if I’d ever find out. Well, you need something to occupy your mind when you’re on the StairMaster.

  You were actually still supposed to keep your gaze down, but it was hard to stick to that, and the trainers wisely didn’t make a big thing about it. Mostly, you were here to work—no pain, no gain, though of course all of us already knew that. How you dealt with your feelings of arousal or humiliation or whatever this all made you feel was your own problem. I suppose everybody, like me, was covertly eyeing the competition. The slaves, or the ones I could easily peek at, ranged from okay to drop-dead gorgeous. And everybody, sweating and straining at their machines or with their weights, had, as you’d probably expect, quite a good body, or even better th
an that. I could only hope that whatever “quality” Kate Clarke had discerned in me would be evident to some buyer as well. Otherwise, I’d have to think about graduate school again.

  Meanwhile, my eyes kept straying to Willful, who was now walking a treadmill across from me. I wanted to stare and stare at him, at the sensitive little muscles in his belly and at the root of his purplish cock, surrounded by wonderful little black curls. I guess I did stare and stare at him, though I kept trying, as Margot put it, to “discipline my gaze.” I was glad when they moved me to a slant board and I had to concentrate on my own stomach muscles.

  The Europop kept tinkling on, but my inner ear turned it into a cut from the oldies stations, one I hadn’t even remembered I knew (one, in fact, that my mother used to annoy me with by loudly singing along whenever it came on the car radio). I sighed and reset the slant board a notch steeper. Great, Carrie, let’s regress to Sexual Fantasy Number One in your whole life (and maybe it isn’t really even your fantasy, maybe it’s Mom’s)—the Bad Boy in the Class. He’s a rebel. Watch the way he shuffles his feet.

  He had stepped off the treadmill, and was, in fact, just standing around shuffling his feet while the Argus, for some reason, hung. It came up, though—way to go, Margot—and he scanned his instructions. What was particularly remarkable about this place was how everybody seemed to have his or her own distinct schedule. I mean, if I’d had to handle a group of slaves, I would have treated them like a group, like in the army or elementary school or Sir Harold’s place. But they didn’t do that here; rather, they treated you, as Margot had put it, like a “rather unique commodity.” Our paths crossed, but we didn’t march in lockstep. This was, I knew, the point of Margot’s complicated software. They didn’t have to use regimentation here—except, I supposed, when they wanted to, when it would serve some distinctly humiliating purpose. It made me think about just how unsubtle some forms of control were and wonder what other forms of control were available, for those of us who get off on contemplating and enacting the rituals of power and domination. Jonathan had said that the idea, often as not, was to mimic the social structure of late feudalism, the ancien régime just at the cusp of the advent of bourgeois democracy. I was wondering just how necessary that all was, or how relevant to the strange times we were living in now, when all of a sudden Willful caught my eye, and—swear to god—quickly mouthed the words, “See you tonight.” Then he sauntered out the gym door.

  I was scared. I thought of Cathy and the little piece of hose. And I was sure somebody—trainer or guard—had noticed, that any minute they’d drag me off to some dark dungeon for some drawing and quartering, or maybe the rack, something tasty out of early—never mind late—feudalism. But nothing happened. If anybody had noticed, he didn’t say anything. The boy, I had to admit, had timing. Street smarts, maybe. I imagined him dressed (like early Marlon Brando—Mom again) to match the song—blue jeans and a tight white T-shirt, a pack of cigarettes under his rolled up sleeve. Black Garrison belt. Engineer’s boots. I found the image very hot. Well, I’d already seen him naked. And I would see him tonight, I realized.

  I spent the rest of my gym time in a confused haze, the remainder of the two and a half hours floating by without my much noticing. Then my bracelet prickled and I followed the schematic back to my room, where another maid cleaned me up and gave me lots of water to drink. As usual, she left me kneeling, in the preferred position of abject attention, waiting, I supposed, for somebody to come to the room to fuck me, as Margot had promised. Cleaned, fed, rested, exercised, and fucked, she’d said. And sure enough some staff member, a really ordinary middle-level bureaucrat, I thought from the look of his shoes, came along. And fucked me silly, though I hardly got to see his face. After he left, I just lay facedown on the bed for about twenty minutes, wondering just how much of this they thought I “needed.” It was an interesting question, and not an entirely unpleasant one, a whole lot more pleasant than the punishment that I was trying not to think about, as the sky darkened outside my window.

  But time inched on, a maid coming by in a while to clean me up again and bring me my predicted tofu and vegetables for dinner. Then some more waiting. Yoga breathing. I hated the suspense. Finally, another security guard, not Karl, thank goodness, came in and attached some truly painful clips to my nipples, with horrid little bells attached to them, and then disappeared silently.

  About fifteen minutes later, my bracelet prickled, and I followed its directions through the corridors, the little bells jingling spitefully and painfully with every step I took. I wound up at a small employee cafeteria, and a security guard at the door led me in. It was a typical, brightly lit, steam-table kind of eating place, with wood-grained Formica-topped tables and molded plastic chairs. The only thing out of the ordinary was a platform about three feet high and maybe twenty-five feet wide against one wall. Two or three slaves were already kneeling here, on hands and knees, asses against the wall, placards dangling from their collars, eyes cast down. Some of the folks eating at the tables were looking them over, pointing, joking and, I suppose, planning the good times to come—the rest were just eating, drinking coffee, hanging out, smoking, and chatting.

  The guard led me to the platform, and I noticed for the first time that there was another nasty wrinkle to the system. They didn’t chain you down or anything. What you did was climb onto the platform and back up—until your asshole was impaled on the dildo mounted on the wall. Thoughtfully, the dildos were mounted at different heights; the guard seemed to have a sense of which was my height—well, I guess they’d get good pretty fast at figuring that one out. It was big—big, cold, smooth, and hard—and, mercifully, well greased. I winced as I backed onto it and was rewarded by a few hoots and giggles, as well as one or two promises that I’d be accommodating a lot more than that before the evening was over. Somebody tossed a little wad of paper at me, which hit my face, then, a banana peel, which kind of bounced off my shoulder. I could feel myself blush, and I bowed my head, but the guard raised my chin with the handle of his whip. The little bells hanging from my aching breasts jingled as I arched my back to help me assume the correct position. I looked at the faces at the tables, banal, jocular, cheerful, and I really did feel punished. Abased. This was different from anything I’d experienced before. I remembered Jonathan’s little speech a million years ago, the one about my jagged little edge of critical intelligence—oh please, gimme a break! These people could care less about my critical edge, about the subtleties of my consciousness, the fine balance between objectification and narrative subjectivity. I felt bereft. I didn’t like to look. I had to keep my head up, but as much as I could, I lowered my eyelids. I could see those damned little bells, shiny under the fluorescent lights and slightly blurred, beneath my SLOW TO OBEY/TALKED OUT OF TURN placard. I put everything I had into trying not to cry.

  A few more slaves were led in, I could see out of the corner of my eye. But I didn’t need to see it when Willfully Disobedient made his entrance—I could tell he was here by the excited murmur in the crowd, the jokes and catcalls, and the little missiles that started flying at him even before he got to the platform. He was the Main Event tonight, baked Alaska or cherries jubilee for dessert, no doubt about that. I forgot about my fears a little and raised my eyelids to watch.

  They got him backed up on the stage and impaled, the security guard taking advantage of his own fifteen minutes of fame by slapping him hard in the face a few times and pulling and twisting at the bells on his nipples (I noticed suddenly that there was also one hanging from his scrotum). The crowd seemed to like the guard’s little show just fine, except that they would have liked to see the boy exhibit less self-control. (Secretly, frighteningly, so would I have, I realized.) Still, even I’d been able to control myself thus far, so I guess they weren’t surprised that he’d done so as well. The evening was young yet.

  But they were already starting to quarrel among themselves. I mean, it was obvious to me, as well as to them of course, that not al
l fifty people in the room were going to get a crack at the Main Event that evening. Some of them were going to have to be satisfied with the rest of us. I didn’t know whether this was good or bad news for me.

  In retrospect, I’m impressed at how well they worked it out—how cheerfully, fairly, and quickly. Of course, this was one of those countries where everybody gets more than a month of paid vacation every year and cradle-to-grave medical care, and they can’t change computer monitors without the union’s okay about the long-term health implications. Add to it an employee benefit like the one I was participating in—like the one I was—and why shouldn’t they be decent and humane? To each other, that was.

  So, as far as I could follow, the rules they improvised were: Willfully Disobedient would be fucked by two teams of ten (it would have to be men, obviously, and I could see that the women were not pleased by this, but biology is destiny sometimes, even under social democracy). They’d line up on either end of him, and the idea was to compete for which team took the longest to get finished coming in him. Bets were taken, though I couldn’t figure out what the prizes would be. They hustled us off the platform and dragged it to the center of the room so that everybody could see. The asshole team grabbed a big tin of some kind of EuroCrisco that somebody had brought out from the kitchen.

  The rest of us were really just bit players. They attached leashes to the rings in our collars so that they could drag us on hands and knees around the crowd (they positioned us at different points). We were popcorn at the movies, mostly, for those watching the entertainment. I was vastly relieved and, somewhere deep inside, just a little insulted. Go figure.