On one level of consciousness, Susan knows that this is merely a realistically animated scenario that she has created actually re-created from memory and with which she can interact in three dimensions through the magic of virtual reality. On another level, however, it seems real to her, and she is able to lose herself in the unfolding drama.
Backlighted in the doorway is a tall man with broad shoulders.
Susan’s heart races. Her mouth is dry.
Rubbing her sleep-matted eyes, she feigns illness: “I don’t feel so good.”
Without a word, he closes the door and crosses the room in the darkness.
As he approaches, young Susan begins to tremble. He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress sags, and the springs creak under him. He is a big man.
His cologne smells of lime and spices.
He is breathing slowly, deeply, as though relishing the little-girl smell of her, the sleepy-middle-of the-night smell of her.
“I have the flu,” she says in a pathetic attempt to turn him away.
He switches on the bedside lamp.
“Real bad flu,” she says.
He is only forty years old but graying at the temples. His eyes are gray too, clear gray and so cold that when she meets his gaze, her trembling becomes a terrible shudder.
“My tummy aches,” she lies.
Putting one hand to Susan’s head, ignoring her pleas of illness, he smoothes her sleep-rumpled hair.
“I don’t want to do this,” she says.
She spoke those words not merely in the virtual world but in the real one. Her voice was small, fragile, although not that of a child.
When she had been a girl, she’d been unable to say no.
Not ever.
Not once.
Fear of resisting had gradually become a habit of submitting.
But this was a chance to undo the past. This was therapy, a program of virtual experience, which she had designed for herself and which had proved to be remarkably effective.
“Daddy, I don’t want to do this,” she says.
“You’ll like it.”
“But I don’t like it.”
“In time you will.”
“I won’t. I never will.”
“You’ll be surprised.”
“Please don’t.”
“This is what I want,” he insists.
“Please don’t.”
They are alone in the house at night. The day staff is off duty at this hour, and after dinner the live-in couple keep to their apartment over the pool house unless summoned to the main residence.
Susan’s mother has been dead more than a year.
She misses her mother so much.
Now, in this motherless world, Susan’s father strokes her hair and says, “This is what I want.”
“I’ll tell,” she says, trying to shrink away from him.
“If you try to tell, I’ll have to make sure no one can ever hear you, ever again. Do you understand, Sweetheart? I’ll have to kill you,” he says not in a menacing way but in a voice still soft and hoarse with perverse desire.
Susan is convinced of his sincerity by the quietness with which he makes the threat and by the apparently genuine sadness in his eyes at the prospect of having to murder her.
“Don’t make me do it, Sugarpie. Don’t make me kill you like I killed your mother.”
Susan’s mother died suddenly from some sickness; young Susan doesn’t know the exact cause, although she has heard the word “infection.”
Now her father says, “Slipped a sedative in her after-dinner drink so she wouldn’t feel the needle later. Then in the night, when she was sleeping, I injected the bacteria. You understand me, honey? Germs. A needle full of germs. Put the germs, the sickness, deep inside her with a needle. Virulent infection of the myocardium, hit her hard and fast. Twenty-four hours of misdiagnosis gave it time to do a lot of damage.”
She is too young to understand many of the terms he uses, but she is clear about the essence of his claim and senses that he speaks the truth.
Her father knows about needles. He is a doctor.
“Should I go get a needle, Sugarpie?”
She is too afraid to speak.
Needles scare her.
He knows that needles scare her.
He knows.
He knows how to use needles, and he knows how to use fear.