David Davis: Members Only (unlocked)

he who tries will be wasted

Will you wait for me here? he asked.

Yes, I said.

He laughed and said goodbye. The front door closed and clicked. For the next hour (though I didn’t know, at the moment, how long my friend would be gone), I tried not to move. If I did, I would be confronted with the limits of my ability, and if so confronted, I would struggle. I didn’t want to struggle, because it’s humiliating, and because I wanted to pretend that I was there of my own volition. Which, I reminded myself, I was.

The air conditioner hummed in the window, but otherwise my friend’s bedroom was silent. I wondered if he hadn’t really left. If he was still there, watching from the doorway. But I soon decided he wasn’t. For one thing, I would have heard him—his shifting weight on the hardwood, a heedless breath. Something. For another, staying here with me wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to go somewhere else, to the park or a nearby bar, and think about me waiting for him naked, hooded, bound hand and foot to the bed frame, and slowly realizing that while Jade knew where I was, I had no way of contacting her if he didn’t come back.

I’ve heard that people in bondage lose time. Maybe I would have myself if sunlight, enough to grey the black vinyl, couldn’t filter through the drawstring of the military-style hood. Or maybe not. I don’t think of myself as into bondage, though I’ve been in close proximity with it for many years. I used to date a dominatrix who specialized in it, with an emphasis on abandonment. Her sleepsacked clients were forsaken in shower stalls overnight, while she slept in a queen bed in the other room. Want to try it? she asked me once. Fuck no. I like attention with my discomfort, thank you very much.

No, I wasn’t enjoying it, what was happening to me. But I was there for reasons other than pleasure. And what were those, exactly? I pushed the question away. In the ten minutes since my friend had left, I had discovered that all speculation led to panic. I began box breathing, intending to do it until I heard the key in the door (When would that be? An hour? Longer?). Since I was lying on my back, the handcuffs had begun slipping down my wrists toward my elbows, a lemniscate of steel digging into my forearms. How long until nerve damage? I pictured my friend ordering a beer, then another, then another, until he forgot all about me.

Stillness, of the body and of the mind, is the greatest challenge. I began doing yoga as preparation for a complete meditation practice without movement, and five years later, I’m nowhere close. Breathing through my nose, I counted to four over and over again, building a new world within the one made by my friend’s dark web torture toys. This, I believed, was the solution to all my fears, which I wanted to transcend. I would hide within the four walls of breath-and-no-breath until he returned.

I wanted. That was the problem, if all suffering is caused by desire. It wasn’t long before my fears infiltrated the counting, the breath, the awareness of my diaphragm. The discomfort from the cuffs reminded me of my hands, which reminded me not of my body, but of everything bad that my body was subject to.

Though I knew my friend was gone, I moved my body as if he wasn’t. Just my fingers and wrists, subtle and sly. I like watching you decide if you’re going to red or not, he told me once. Slowly, slowly; stillness was impossible, but I knew if I moved too much or too fast, I would lose control. With my index finger, I stroked the lock that held the cuffs to the velcro restraint around my waist. The metal was smooth and, I knew without being able to see, shiny. Kind of cute. I imagined that the lock was a locket, which became tattoo on my left pec, like Richard Gere's in Breathless (1983). I thought about putting it in my mouth. My hands could have reached that high, but the lock wouldn’t have gotten under the hood. Moving a little more boldly, I found that I had enough freedom to reach down and touch myself, if I wanted (I didn’t). But that was as far as my hands could go.

Afterward, I told my friend that I thought about him the entire time he was gone, but that wasn’t true. Though powerfully shaped by his absence, my thoughts were almost entirely self-centered. The risk I was taking; the discomfort I was feeling; the panic hovering in my solar plexus, still bruised purple by his knuckles. I yearned for other circumstances, not ones in which I was free, but in which my restrictions were more tolerable¹. What if I hadn’t been wearing the hood? I would feel less calm, I suspected, but also less powerless. What if my friend were standing outside the building, or even at the bottom of the stairs, absent but nearby? I desperately wanted this to be true, but every time I forced myself to see the fantasy for what it was, my breath became hotter and louder on the inside of the hood, the drawstring tighter around my throat, my ankles more firmly secured.

As I write, I can’t feel that fear anymore; it’s as if someone else was in that hood, those chains. But while in the moment it was inescapable—by design, of course—I also found it impossible to believe. Every nightmare provoked another, every attempt to regain control surfacing a horrifying new way to suffer. In attempting to think my way out of my fear, to manufacture reasons why it wasn’t really happening the way it was, it grew heavier, more ingenious. How long would he make me sweat it out? When would I know that it was time to panic, that he wasn’t coming back? Four hours? More? And what did panic mean? Was it any different from what I was doing right now?

Through the slit below my chin, I noticed that the sunlight had begun to fail. How long before I pissed myself? How long before I felt the torture of thirst? Of course, all of that would only possibly happen if something tragic befell my friend, like a car accident. I imagined him standing on the sidewalk in front of his apartment, unable to enter because of a police barricade or clouds of smoke. How selfish I am, I thought, worrying about his misfortune, not for his own sake, but for mine.

Fearful, uncomfortable, resentful, ashamed, helpless. A brutal caning, with my friend’s warm body touching mine, talking to me and kissing me while he hurt me, was heaven in comparison. Why was I doing this? I was all alone. No one cared about me. I was nothing. If he came back, I was never doing this again.

And I really believed that, before I heard the key in the lock.

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1. As if I had a choice but to tolerate them.