27

      Is there anything more beautiful than a girl with a lute?

      It wasn’t a lute. Heather, the Breavmans’ maid, attempted the ukulele. She came from Alberta, spoke with a twang, was always singing laments and trying to yodel.

      The chords were too hard. Breavman held her hand and agreed that the strings were tearing her fingers to pieces. She knew all the cowboy stars and traded their autographs.

      She was a husky, good-looking girl of twenty with high-coloured cheeks like a porcelain doll. Breavman chose her for his first victim of sleep.

      A veritable Canadian peasant.

      He tried to make the offer attractive.

      ‘You’ll feel wonderful when you wake up.’

      Sure, she winked and settled herself on the couch in the crammed basement store-room. If only it would work.

      He moved his yellow pencil like a slow pendulum before her eyes.

      ‘Your eyelids will feel heavy as lead on your cheeks…’

      He swung the pencil for ten minutes. Her large eyelids thickened and slowed down. She followed the pencil with difficulty.

      ‘And your breathing heavy and regular…’

      Soon she let out a sigh, took in a deep breath, and breathed like a drunkard, laboured and exhausted.

      Now the eyelashes barely flickered. He couldn’t believe that he had ordered the changes in her. Maybe she was joking.

      ‘You’re falling backwards, you’re a tiny body falling backwards, getting smaller and smaller, and you can hear nothing but my voice…’

      Her breath was soft and he knew it would smell like wind.

      He felt as though he had got his hands under her sweater, under her skin and ribs, and was manipulating her lungs, and they felt like balloons of silk.

      ‘You are asleep,’ he commanded in a whisper.

      He touched her face in disbelief.

      Was he really a master? She must be joking.

      ‘Are you asleep?’

      The yes came out the length of an exhalation, husky, unformed.

      ‘You can feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you understand?’

      The same yes.

      He drove a needle through the lobe of her ear. He was dizzy with his new power. All her energy at his disposal.

      He wanted to run through the streets with a bell and summon the whole cynical city. There was a new magician in the world.

      He had no interest in ears pierced by needles.

      Breavman had studied the books. A subject cannot be compelled to anything which he would consider indecent while awake. But there were ways. For instance, a modest woman can be induced to remove her clothes before an audience of men if the operator can suggest a situation in which such an act can be performed quite naturally, such as taking a bath in the privacy of her own home, or a naked rest under the sun in some humid deserted place.

      ‘It’s hot, you’ve never been so hot. Your sweater weighs a ton. You’re sweating like a pig…’

      As she undressed Breavman kept thinking of the illustrations in the pulp-paper Hypnotism for You manuals he knew by heart. Line drawings of fierce men leaning over smiling, sleeping women. Zigzags of electricity emanate from under the heavy eyebrows or from the tips of their piano-poised fingers.

      Oh, she was, she really was, she was so lovely.

      He had never seen a woman so naked. He ran his hand all over her body. He was astonished, happy, and frightened before all the spiritual authorities of the universe. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that he was performing a Black Mass. Her breasts were strangely flat because she was lying on her back. The mound of her delta was a surprise and he cupped it in wonder. He covered her body with two trembling hands like minedetectors. Then he sat back to stare, like Cortez over his new ocean. This was what he had waited for so long to see. He wasn’t disappointed and never has been. The tungsten light was the same as the moon.

      He unbuttoned his fly and told her she was holding a stick. His heart pounded.

      He was intoxicated with relief, achievement, guilt, experience. There was semen on his clothes. He told Heather that the alarm clock had just rung. It was morning, she had to get up. He handed her her clothes and slowly she got dressed. He told her that she would remember nothing. Hurriedly he took her out of the sleep. He wanted to be alone and contemplate his triumph.

      Three hours later he heard laughter from the basement and thought that Heather must be entertaining friends down there. Then he listened more carefully to the laughter and realized that it wasn’t social.

      He raced down the stairs. Thank God his mother was out. Heather was standing in the centre of the floor, legs apart, convulsed with frightened, hysterical laughter. Her eyes were rolled up in her head and shone white. Her head was thrown back and she looked as if she was about to fall over. He shook her. No response. Her laughter became a terrible fit of coughing.

      I’ve driven her insane.

      He wondered what the criminal penalty was. He was being punished for his illegal orgasm and his dark powers. Should he call a doctor, make his sin public right away? Would anyone know how to cure her?

      He was close to panic as he led her to the couch and sat her down. Perhaps he should hide her in a closet. Lock her in a trunk and forget about everything. Those big steamers with his father’s initials stencilled in white paint.

      He slapped her face twice, once with each side of his hand, like a Gestapo investigator. She caught her breath, her cheeks reddened and faded like a blush, and she spluttered again into cough-laughing. There was saliva on her chin.

      ‘Be