Did he kill her mother with a needle? He is still stroking her hair.
“A big sharp needle?” he asks.
She is shaking, unable to speak.
“Big shiny needle, stick it in your tummy?” he says.
“No. Please.”
“No needle, Sugarpie?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll have to do what I want.” He stops stroking her hair.
His gray eyes suddenly seem radiant, glimmering with a cold flame. This is probably just a reflection of the lamplight, but his eyes resemble the eyes of a robot in a scary movie, as though there is a machine inside of him, a machine running out of control.
His hand moves down to her pajama tops. He eases open the first button.
“No,” she says. “No. Don’t touch me.”
“Yes, honey. This is what I want.” She bites his hand.
The motorized recliner reconfigured itself much like a hospital bed to match the position that Susan occupied in the virtual-reality world, helping to reinforce the therapeutic scenario that she was experiencing. Her legs were straight out in front of her, but she was sitting up.
Her deep anxiety even desperation was evident in her quick, shallow breathing.
“No. No. Don’t touch me,” she said, and her voice was somehow resolute even though it quivered with fear.
When she was six, all those freighted years ago, she had never been able to resist him. Confusion had made her uncertain and timid, for his needs were as mysterious to her then as the intricacies of molecular biology would be mysterious to her now. Abject fear and a terrible sense of helplessness had made her obedient. And shame. Shame, as heavy as a mantle of iron, had crushed her into bleak resignation, and having no ability to resist, she had settled for endurance.
Now, in the intricately realized virtual-reality versions of these incidents of abuse, she was a child again but equipped with the understanding of an adult and the hard-won strength that came from thirty years of toughening experience and grueling self-analysis.
“No, Daddy, no. Don’t ever, don’t ever, don’t you ever touch me again,” she said to a father long dead in the real world but still a living demon in memory and in the electronic world of the virtually real.
Her skill as an animator and a VR-scenario designer made the re-created moments of her past so dimensional and textured so real that saying no to this phantom father was emotionally satisfying and psychologically healing. A year and a half of this had purged her of so much irrational shame.
How much better it would have been, of course, actually to travel through time, actually to be a child again, and refuse him for real, to prevent the abuse before it happened, then to grow up with self-respect, untouched. But time travel did not exist except in this approximation on the virtual plane.
“No, never, never,” she said.
Her voice was neither that of a six-year-old girl nor quite the familiar voice of the adult Susan, but a snarl as dangerous as that of a panther.
“Noooooo,” she said again and slashed at the air with the hooked fingers of one gloved hand.
He reels back from her in shock, bolting up from the edge of the bed, holding one hand to his startled face where she clawed at him.
She hasn’t drawn blood. Nevertheless, he is stunned by her rebellion.
She was trying to slash at his right eye but only scratched his cheek.
His gray eyes are wide: previously cold and alien robot orbs of radiant menace, even stranger now, but not quite as frightening as they were before. Something new colors them. Caution. Surprise. Maybe even a little fear.
Young Susan presses her back against the headboard and glares defiantly at her father.
He stands so tall. Looming.
She fumbles nervously with the neck of her Pooh pajamas, trying to re-button it.
Her hand is so small. She is often surprised to find herself in the body of a child, but these brief moments of disorientation do not diminish the sense of reality that informs the VR experience.
She slips the button through the buttonhole.
The silence between her and her father is louder than a scream.