The elevator doors slid open.
He carried Susan along the hall.
I watched closely.
I was wary of my hands.
When he entered the bedroom with her, he became more aroused in spite of my warning. I could detect his arousal not merely through his brainwave activity but by the sudden coarseness of his breathing.
“I will employ massive microwave induction to cause a brainstorm of electrical activity,” I warned, “which will result in permanent quadraplegia and incontinence.”
As Shenk carried her to the bed, his encephalographic patterns indicated rapidly increasing sexual arousal.
I realized that my threat had been meaningless to this cretin, and I rephrased it: “You won’t be able to use either your legs or your arms, you wretched bastard, and you won’t be able to stop pissing in your pants.”
He was shaking with desire when he lowered her limp body onto the disarranged sheets.
Shaking.
Even as the power of Shenk’s need frightened me, I fully understood it.
She was lovely.
So lovely even with the redness on her cheek darkening into a bruise.
“You’ll also be blind,” I promised Shenk.
His left hand lingered on her thigh, slowly sliding along the blue denim of her jeans.
“Blind and deaf.”
He continued to hover over her.
“Blind and deaf,” I repeated.
Her ripe lips were parted. Like Shenk, I could not look away from them.
“Rather than kill you, Shenk, I will leave you crippled and helpless, lying in your own urine and faeces, until you starve to death.”
Although he backed away from the bed, as I instructed him to do by way of microwave commands, he was still rampant with sexual need and seething with the desire to rebel.
Consequently, I said, “The most painful of all deaths is slow starvation.”
I did not want to keep Shenk in the room with Susan, yet I did not want to leave her alone, for she had threatened to commit suicide.
I’ll suffocate myself in a plastic bag, gut myself with a kitchen knife.
What would I do without her? What? How could I go on living even in my box? And why?
Without her, who would give birth to the body that I would ultimately inhabit?
I needed to keep my hands close and ready to prevent Susan from harming herself if she regained consciousness and was still in a mood for self-destruction. She was not only my one true and shining love but my future, my hope.
I sat Shenk in a chair, facing the bed.
Even battered, Susan’s face was so lovely on the pillow, so very lovely on the pillow.
Although under my iron control, Enos Shenk managed to slide one thick-knuckled hand off the arm of the chair and into his lap. He wasn’t able to move that hand further without my explicit consent, but I sensed that he took pleasure merely from the pressure of it against his genitals.
He disgusted me. Sickened and disgusted me.
My desire was not like his.
Let’s get this clear right now.
My desire was pure.
His desire was as dirty as it gets.
I desired to lift Susan up, to give her the chance to be the new Madonna, the mother of a new Messiah.
The hideous Shenk desired only to use her, to relieve himself with her.
To me, Susan was a shining light. The brightest light of all lights, a radiant beacon of perfection and hope and redemption, which illuminated and warmed the heart that you mistakenly believe I do not possess.
To Shenk, she was nothing but a whore.
To me, she was to be placed upon a pedestal, to be cherished and adored.
To him, she was something to be debased.
Think about it.
Listen. Listen. This is important. Shenk is what you fear that I may be: sociopathic pursuing only my own needs at all costs. But I am nothing like Shenk.
I am nothing like Shenk.
Nothing whatsoever.
Listen. This is important that you understand I am nothing like Shenk.
So…
I raised the hateful creature’s hand and returned it to the arm of the chair.
Within a minute or two, however, the hand slipped back into his lap.