In the beginning there had always been dessert, usually chocolate mousse or ice cream, something sweet to counter the heat of the meal. But an ingredient in it, perhaps something as simple as its fat or sugar content, reacted with the datura and nauseated him, producing cramps with violent vomiting. If the portions were small, the food did not alter the effects of the drug. He searched impatiently for the cup of datura. Usually he made it himself, brewing it before breakfast. Ava had become expert at making it too, stewing the scrapings of the twigs broken from the framework of the Indian basket, then straining the liquid and letting it cool. Not much of the drug was needed to make an effective drink. The strength of it lay in the reduction, the simmering that thickened it to an earthy darkness. A jug stewed on Monday lasted most of the week. Steadman could see that if he was careful in cutting the basket and cooking the datura he would have a year’s supply of the drug, enough to finish the book.
He had been blind since morning, but in the evening his blindness seemed to lift, as though there were slashes in the fluttery veil before his eyes. Holding the cup in both hands, making a formal gesture of drinking the drug, he lifted the cup to his lips and swallowed it all. The taste was something he knew he would never get used to. It was the taste of the jungle — birds, vines, dark blossoms, the clammy scales of snakes, the sour tang of insects, the iridescence of beetles’ wings — and it enclosed him in a tight and luminous bandage, as if he had been caught in a subtle web and wrapped in a spider’s glowing spittle.
Tapping the finger pad of his cell phone, he sensed the heat of the number in its memory showing on the screen. He tapped again, and almost at once he heard a ring in the far end of the house, Ava’s wing. No one else used that line; the number was like an endearment.
“I am waiting for you,” she said in a summoning tone, authoritative, insistent, a doctor’s order.
Getting to his feet, Steadman had to grip the table to steady himself, and he realized how impatient he was. He staggered slightly.
He shuffled through the corridors, growing warmer, sensing the flesh around his eyes getting puffy, his breathing becoming labored, his nose partly blocked, his scalp tightening as though a cap were shrinking on his head. Becoming sexually aroused affected his whole body with a kind of jitters, giving him hot spots, making him stumble, thickening his fingers and toes, filling him with blood and light, while a dark curtain twitched across his brain, leaving him pleasantly semiconscious. The druggy confusions of lust, the numbed muscles and quickened nerves, which were so pleasurable.
Going to see the doctor—
Nothing to him was more exciting than being in this heightened state and moving forward, through the shadows of these back corridors to Ava’s suite. That was the best of it, the foreknowledge — assured of the general plan and seeking out the doctor to learn the specifics.
The doctor was waiting for him, naked beneath her white doctor’s coat—
He became excited, seeing the door ajar, the dim light, the glimpse of the woman’s long naked leg. She was standing at the far side of the dim candlelit room, not lying on the bed as she sometimes did. She held a glass of wine, and she had posed herself before a mirror, so he could see the back of her head. Tonight her hair was short, like a boy’s. She had a shapely head and slender neck.
She had transformed herself and become androgynous — another of her surprises. She looked so different he did not even try to make a connection between her and the woman who had been taking dictation all day. The white doctor’s coat was only superficially clinical, for it was raw silk, a fluttery robe, and underneath, easily visible when she lifted her leg and placed her black high-heeled shoe on a chair seat, the black panties.
“Doctor,” he said.
“Lock the door.”
The mirror caught the light. He preferred seeing her in the mirror; he knew her better, desired her most, from her reflection.
Even from the few words she spoke he could tell that she had been drinking. That too made her less familiar. It was important that she be a stranger. Ava taking dictation had no body, no allure, no perfume; but the boyish doctor in this room, with red lips and bright eyes, was primarily sensual.
“I need you to lie down,” she said.
Just before he obeyed, he pretended to resist, a second of delay that made Ava insistent, almost scolding, and he surrendered to her at once.
“Over here — none of that.”
Seeing that she held some straps she called restraints, he lay on the bed and allowed her to tie his hands to the uprights of the bedstead. He smelled the wine and saw her glazed and greedy eyes. He was pleased knowing that she had been drinking, for when drunk, she was impulsive. Their encounters worked best when she was enigmatic and unpredictable.
Ava unclasped the heavy buckle of his belt and eased it out of the loops of his pants. With a chafing sound, stiff cloth against skin, she slipped his blue jeans off, giving his swelling penis a little slap, affection and severity in a single gesture.
“This is a swap,” Ava said.
Knowing he was watching, his whole body alert, she used her thumbs to push down her panties, then let them slip to her ankles and stepped out of them, just a wisp of silk on the floor. Watching, he was overwhelmed, for what she had just done was an expression of power, not submission. She wrapped his leather belt around her waist and cinched it, jerking the end with one hand, against the buckle.
She climbed onto the bed and sat on him, facing away, and got the panties over his feet and up his legs.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re my dolly,” and she laughed, as if she were dressing a doll and did not have to answer back. And she gave him to understand that he was not any doll but an imposing one, a doll to cherish and play with, made to represent fantasies of her own. As soon as the panties were tightened on him he became aroused, and though she stroked him and he pleaded for more and tugged against his restraints, she would not touch him except through the silk, teasing him with her fingers.
“I’m going to give you a new face,” Ava said. “A pretty one.”
She placed a tray of bottles and jars on the bed and powdered his face, talking all the while, describing what she was doing. She rouged his cheeks, painted his lips with a small brush — lip gloss, she told him.
What had begun as play now seemed like a serious ritual, a sacrificial ceremony, for the body on the bed was like one on an operating table, and he was being worked on and transformed. He tried to imagine how he must look, terror in his eyes, a girl’s face, a clown’s mouth, a painted doll with bulging panties.
“You’re in my power. I can do whatever I want with you,” Ava said. “I am your doctor. Do exactly as I say.”
It occurred to Steadman that this was what brutes dictated to their victims when they had murder in mind, yet she also sounded like a physician, reminding him of his weakness, making him submit to a medical procedure. Only as her victim did he realize how badly he needed her, for she was at that moment the only other person on earth.
The more feminized he became, the more he belonged to her; she took possession of him by making him her dolly, creating the image of someone she wanted. The more completely he was made submissive, the clearer he saw her desire, and the more powerful he felt.
“Why are you smiling?” she said, but lightly, as though she knew the answer.
She wheeled the full-length mirror on its stand nearer the bed, and in the long oval of cheval glass she studied him, moved his head a little and contemplated it, touched his lips with the brush again, dabbed at his cheeks, fluffed his hair.