Ethical Dominatrix

(2024)

The catalyst has a forgettable name, like Lana or Janie, I’m no snitch so I won’t say, but it’s something entirely unbefitting a girl who keeps a shovel in her trunk for scraping roadkill. Her magic wand, she would call it.

I’ll be honest, it is hard for me to imagine someone like her being a girl, she is more of a woman. But something about woman makes me think of V-neck dresses and lipstick. Someone like my mother. But a girl is always pretty, something Lana or Janie is not. Lana or Janie is hairy, naturally muscular in unusual places and has a big mole right between her breasts which looks like a third nipple. I know this about her because I’ve seen her naked.

The sight hadn’t been romantic. It had been dysfunctional, the start of this sequence of disturbing events that would lead to my expulsion and my subsequent plea to the Vice Chancellor to keep me enrolled despite his best efforts to keep the ordeal out of police hands, he’d said, making me imagine two giant hands puppeteering the masses, that’s the kind of thing you learn to imagine in liberal arts school and I was not such an outcast that I didn’t buy the pulp.

It had been my mother’s birthday and as an only child without too many ambitions of my own, my gambit towards avoiding falling out of favor with my parents who still subsidized my life meant I always called in on holidays and birthdays. I’d climbed to the top floor of the University Library to the wraparound porch to make my call. Presssttoonnn? my baby! My mother had said, the receiver must have been right next to her lips because I had to crank the volume down on my phone so a group of students smoking on the wraparound couldn’t hear my mother say Oh my baby, I love you so muuuuch.

I let her drone on for a while until my father took the phone away from her. I could envision him taking her by the arm, roughly because she can’t feel anything anyways, and throwing her on the bed like a puppet to sleep it off while he watched the game.

I’d just gotten off the phone when one of the tobacconists called out to me. I looked over in their direction and saw their intimate circle had opened up to reveal the heart center, a little table coated with ash and rolling papers. There were three boys and two girls, girls as in pretty, boys as in sweatshirts.

You’re that guy who called Angela a slut! One of the boys said.

I said I had called her a fallen woman and that it was in relation to her perception that she is liberated by her craft. I do not believe she is freeing herself by having intercourse with so many people. I said. Intercourse does not denote liberation. It solidifies objectification and consolidation of two individuals. It should be respected. I couldn’t believe I was having to explain this to a guy in a sweatshirt.

What the actual fuck is wrong with you! One of the girls shouted back. There was no need to shout we were only a few feet away from each other.

Nothing is wrong with me. I said taking a step back because one of the guys had just jutted forward with a fist raised as if he were going to punch me. I’m gonna beat your ass so bad, he was saying in a way that made me think he was probably one of Angela’s lackeys who helped her develop this sense of ‘liberation.’ He was just an apostle. Before I could assume a panic position, a second guy lunged forward, grabbed the first by the hood and said cool it man, he’s just autistic.

I am in fact not autistic. People have tried to diagnose me before, including guys in sweatshirts. And maybe it would be better, more acceptable to be autistic, but it just isn’t for me.  

When I was in the 5th grade, I was suspended for reenacting the Civil War’s more atrocious hate crimes during my American History group project presentation using ‘unwilling’ volunteers. I was only trying to provide a devil’s advocate perspective. The result was a hogwash of psychiatry to try and help me with my unfortunate personality. The doctors all came back with the same result. There is nothing wrong with him. This is just how his brain operates, they’d said, we can put him on anti-depressants, but he’s not depressed, a fact my mother could never accept that as true. Why wasn’t there a pill for my condition? That’s when she began ‘testing’ pills. Lately she’ll test five or six at once.

In hindsight, I could have turned around and socked the guy, but I just went back inside the library instead and that probably makes me a pacifist.

Wanting to wash my hands and start over, I headed to where I remembered the disabled single toilet to be. The sign for the disabled bathroom has fallen off. I personally like it this way, because it is a secret bathroom, but I can see how some certain individuals in the university’s constituency might flag it for ableism. There are two doors next to each other. I wasn’t sure which one it was, so I stepped through the right.

The Blackbox theater was pitch black except for a bright spotlight on a naked body. Let me tell you, it was like looking at a photograph. My pupils contracted and expanded in confusion; what kind of light was there to be experienced in there? Was she a small woman? Or just far away? That’s when I saw the third nipple.

Hey Tinkertoy, are you in or out? She said. She had a dead cat wrapped around her neck. 

I closed the door behind me. The room sealed itself. We were in space, and this was our shuttle to another land. Except this was the land. I watched her unwrap the cat from her neck, although it wasn’t so much of an unwrapping as much as it was a cracking of its back. The thing was in rigor mortis. She threw it down with a thud.

Pass me that jug, she said. I followed the line of her finger to the plastic jug of some dark liquid.

Come on hurry up. She said.

I dragged the jug to where Lana or Janie stood. I felt embarrassed looking at her body up close, but she didn’t seem to mind. She even bent over, exposing her bottom. I could see her hairy legs and a patch of dark wiry hair on her lower back. To be honest, I had never seen a naked body in the light before. She unscrewed the cap, and the gasoline filled the room with its toxic fumes and I had to blink away several real tears.

Ok now get out of the frame, she said. I hadn’t realized there was a camera on us until then. I wondered if I should ask about a waver, just to de-implicate myself from whatever she was about to do with the gasoline, but I didn’t have time to ask because the second I steppe dout of the way, she stood up and tipped the jug over her head.

 The black liquid melted over her frizzy brown hair, suctioning it to her face. She dropped the jug, letting it bounce around like a bucking horse, and grabbed the cat. She slung the thing over her neck then stood palms outward like a saint receiving unusual wisdom through a direct channel with a higher power. Black drops stretched and fell from her pointy nipples, sliding over the third one like a wave, a scene made more beautiful by the risk of a blinding or transdermal poisoning. She was a Houdini.

I waited for Lana or Janie to receive whatever she expected to receive. How did this girl find access to a jug of crude oil? Is the Environmental Science Department giving out grants? And then after about five long minutes when most of the oil had fallen to the floor onto the tarp leaving a watery brown sheen over her body, she dropped the cat for a second time with a thud.

Pass me a towel. She said. I did. She scrubbed at her face and then spit onto the cat.

The action appeared to refresh her because she looked directly at me with such clarity it was as if she had just opened the door to an expected visitor. I was her familiar species, and she mine.

 Ok now get out.

I didn’t see her again until after spring break although it wasn’t for trying. I couldn’t get her out of my head. I had this feeling she was full of unspoken wisdoms and so I returned to the room every day but either found it pitch black, or otherwise lit by horrible fluorescent lighting. The smell of gasoline each day fading away.

I began hanging out around the art building, finding reasons to go into the photo lab I don’t have swipe access to. I usually just stood around in the hallway making fake phone calls until somebody came in or out. I have a debt collector after me for an unpaid ER visit first semester when I was hit by a car and broke my clavicle and so I would drag out conversations with him, teasing him with things like hang on I just gotta find my card, it’s in here somewhere.

I was on one of these calls when I finally saw her. She burst through the double doors to the art building, a huge black raincoat billowing out behind her. She was wearing a stringy tank top with the tagline “fuck safe, shoot clean” on it with a pinup woman riding a syringe like a witch’s broom.

Yo twinky! I’ve been looking for you! She said as she approached, let’s go, it’s getting dark.

Lana or Janie dragged me by the wrist out to the parking lot as though we had pre-planned a meeting for which I was late. I was still in shock at that point so when she ordered me into her car, I got in, no questions, and let her drive me out to the countryside beyond town.

There is no romance in Ohio, no tradition as far as I an tell. This is a place of practicality, of corn and soybean and unpayable loans. As we drive, Lana or Janie explains to me how the kind of farming happening out here is a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. People expect life to get worse, and so they plant harder and the harder they plant, the worse the soil gets. Without any time for nutrient turnover, they pump a kernel full of fertilizer, or electric water as she calls it, and then that electric water poisons their children who in turn will be born or give birth to more babies with expensive autoimmune disorders whose medical needs financially bolster the pharmaceutical industry. They are slaves to a larger function; we eat at their expense.

But what’s good about her is that she’s not the kind to blame the people who scrape the mud down to the lowest sedimentary layer, she blames the governing bodies at play. I think if I were her, and had all that information, I would blame the people for drinking the contaminated water and I would blame the contaminated babies for growing up and having contaminated children. So, you see, she was the kind of ethical dominatrix I needed to set me straight.

We pulled to the side of the road, the car cocked dangerously next to a ditch. She took out her magic wand and instructed me to scrape up a possum. What possum? I asked and so she turned on the brights, illuminating a furry lump on the asphalt. It was intact except for its tail, this one has been run over by a petro-masculine vehicle, she said, leaning over and pushing open the passenger side door.

The air was bitter cold and dry, all around the fields looked blue in the afterlight. A truck passed us by on the opposite side of the road whipping up a spray of dust. I coughed, she honked the car, I got down on my knees and began scrapping the possum off where it lay fused with the pavement in a pool of its own dried fluids.  

I thought it would smell, I said when I got back into the car.

Blood doesn’t smell, she said, its decay that stinks. Wait till tomorrow, you’ll be plugging your teeny nose then.

We made five or six more stops for animals like the first, the back of the trunk getting fuller with fresh death. Each time she narrated the event of its end. She calculated speed based on the skid marks, if there were any, or sometimes she would even describe the kind of person behind the wheel. They were usually heartless, violent types in abusive relationships with their spouses. When the moon reached it height, we turned back and headed down the highway. That’s when she started asking questions.

What is your home life like?

Like my room? I thought of my roommate who had requested a room change in the first week.

No the one you have to go to when the dorms close. She explained.

It’s alright, I said.

She said I needed to learn to tell a story.

We drove a while in silence, taking a cross-country road that lay perpendicular to every single train track in Loraine County. I’d thought the questioning was through, that there was nothing else to be said on that subject. I was just her companion, her assistant. I foolishly though I was being valued for my hollowness. Whatever I had experienced in the past would be disregarded to make space for her to mold me, fill me up with her theories and beliefs. I was overly eager for it and perhaps naïve to believe I didn’t have to be anybody for her.

We turned off the road onto an even bumpier back road which would take us behind various properties of which the owners were the kind to own rifles and execute their right to shoot.

Listen, she said as we flew over a set of train tracks. The car came crashing down on the other side, prevailing despite the rocks flying up against the underbelly, if you’re going to work for me, you’re going to have to tell me something of substance. Do you get what I mean?

Like an interesting environmental fact?

Lol. She said, no dumbass, you really are sheltered. No, I mean something of leverage. Something I can use to solidify your loyalty to me and my cause.

Something personal? I asked.

Yeah, something you don’t want people knowing.

Despite my unlikability, I think of myself as a thoughtful person. If you have children of your own, for example, it would make me cautious about relaying disturbing information about other children so in this case I might only go so far as to allude to the nature of the personal leverage I shared with Lana or Janie.

Between the ages of 12 and 13, my mother would sometimes test a pill and then subsequently she would confuse her bedroom with mine and sometimes she would confuse me with my father and as I said before, my father is a passive man, the kind to just lie there in the dark so it wasn’t too difficult to assume his role. I explained all this to Lana or Janie thinking she would have some educated explanation for this behavior, but she was silent. The car continued to lurch, and I worried I had once again failed to tell her a good story. She did not speak until we returned to the paved road.

The first thing she asked was if I loved or hated my mother. I said neither. She asked me if my mother and father loved or hated me. I said they loved me. And then she asked me what that felt like, but I couldn’t describe it as a physical sensation.

 In the next few weeks, the snow melted creating channels of grey water for cars to skid on. We took many drives like the first with me as the sole wielder of the magic wand. We even watched a car hit a squirrel in town. The hit was not fatal, and we watched how it began crawling with its front legs, dragging the dead part of itself behind until eventually the front caught up with the back.

Sometime in mid-May, we took to laying out in the arboretum. She usually went topless and let me stare at her breasts and her hairy nipples. Sometimes she plucked the hairs there until they were red or scabbed, and then she would squeeze the scabs.

On one of these days in the arboretum, she sat up and announced her desire to make one last statement to secure her legacy on campus. Until the posters for commencement weekend events started showing up around town and in the stairwells, I hadn’t thought about what it would mean to remain behind for another 3 years without her. I had no other friends. Not that she would consider me a friend, but she talked to me at very least, and at very most, needed me for her work.

People are too soft with their whole green spaces and recycling, she said, we need people to be fucking terrified for their lives at all times for anything to actually happen.

I asked her what she meant by this.

She said our survival instinct is the most potent human function. I thought about this. Until that point, I had never been in survival mode. The only time I could think of was when my mother drove straight into the garage door. My father had been working with his tools and would have suffered a direct hit if he hadn’t run into the house to hide his beer cans (he wasn’t allowed to drink at home).

That’s why terrorism works. Lana or Janie said, the threat of it changes behavior. Think about airport security, there was a time we didn’t think we needed it. The Post 9/11 world is all about metal detection. Terrorism, for example, is the highest form of activism because it triggers survival instincts and forces people to tread lightly on protected regions in anticipation of trick landmines.

True, I said. I had never heard of this before.

Her big statement was described to me as bigger than what Peta could ever muster. It would challenge forever the scheme of expensive congregation. Highlight the megatons of carbon emissions from the jet planes from out of staters flying in just for the symbolic gesture of familial alliance.

So, are your parents not coming to your graduation? I asked. She was from Oregon.

Heck no, she said, and I’m proud of it. They’ve got real lives.

The plan was to blow up a cow carcass at commencement. The cow would be hidden under the stage, positioned just right, she explained, to burn the legs of the graduates, and the faces of the front rows of the audience, the expensive tickets bought only by out of stater families who pay full tuition and had the largest carbon footprints from private jets or frequent flights.

Two days before commencement, Lana or Janie picked me up at our usual time from the library café and took me on a drive. It was a normal gray day in May. We drove through Lorain passing down a road that took us through every small-town until Grafton.

Lana or Janie had gotten wind of a parasite moving through a place called White Oak Ranch and we were going to scope it out. Smell that? She’d said. We were parked on the side of the road directly across from a great wooden barn with steel enforcements. The smell was horrible, simultaneously sweet as much as it was rotting. It was neither acidic like vomit, nor earthy like grazing animals; it smelled like sickness.

That’s the smell of parasitic cattle she said. Normally when that shit hits they gotta shoot all of them. It’s a major disaster on a lot of levels.

Her plan was for us to sneak in before the graves were dug. She explained how Ranchers say they’re tough to the realities of the life cycle but there’s a reserve of softness for those who work with animals. They are the kind who grew up with a special calf or kid, a hen, until the day came where they had to toughen up with a knife or a rifle.

He'll do it at night when he’s drunk, she said, and we’ll be there to catch one fall.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought through how we would transport such a considerable beast. How the thing would be lifted into her Toyota Corolla sedan using just our four arms. In my head the hard part was not being seen. It never occurred to me to question the plan.

The night before commencement we were to meet in the lot behind the art building. I was to wear all black. This was the kind of occasion where one might need a sweatshirt, but like I said, I’m no swain. I had just decided on a turtleneck when my phone started ringing.

Pressstttoonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn, it was my mother.

She said something like, Listen, honeyyy. I’m so proud of you. You’re goint’a look so good in your cap and gowwnnn. Etc…And then she said Your daddddddd--- He’s gone nwon’t see you graduate.

At this point in the conversation, I thought either my father was dead, or my mother was experiencing some kind of delusion. As it turned out he was at a miniature boating tournament on Lake Eerie, he’d gotten free ticket in the mail.

They gave me tickets. Big tickets…tomorrowwww for your biiig day. She said.

I’m not graduating tomorrow mom. Is dad okay?

Yeah, he’s fine! Just a big jerkkk.

Ok I said, mollified. I wanted to get off the phone. She was making me late for the meetup. I told her to sleep it off, have a couple slices of ham, and then hung up.

I had to run all the way to the lot so that by the time I got there, my whole back and neck was drenched. It was far too hot for a turtleneck. I waited for three hours, but she never showed up. I didn’t know where she lived, I didn’t have her number, I didn’t even know her full name, so all I could do was slink back to my dorm room and wait. After a sleepless night I decided the only thing I could do was go to the ceremony in the morning and look for her there.

I could see what Lana or Janie meant by the excessive pomp and circumstance of a graduation ceremony. The entire front lawn of the university gets trampled to mud by the end of the day, all the tiny microbials impaled by tent poles and plastic chairs. I slipped into the auditorium to try to find Lana or Janie.

I stood to the side in the back while the graduates filed in looking for Lana or Janie, but everyone looked the same from the back. I walked to the side of the auditorium only when the Vice Chancellor took to the stage for the pre-commencement speech.

I have utmost respect for the authority. I am a natural captive audience member, if someone is up on stage giving a speech it is very difficult for me to tune it out and so and so I was finding it difficult to balance my total veneration of the Chancellors surprisingly enlightened address to the senior class with the agitation of finding Lana or Janie. It was perhaps this very confused attempt to both attend to the Chancellor and the find Lana or Janie which caused me to inadvertently cast my eyes on front row of seats and see my very own Mother sitting directly in the front row.

When my mother had said she’d been given free tickets, I imagined she referred to a sales catalogue picked up off the front hallway floor with a coupon for bathrobes. Those old Victorian homes in Detroit still have mail slots and when she is on pills, she’s prone to believe anything she holds in her hands is far more significant than it is. One time, she found a graded top sheet from an exam I failed in the trashcan. She’d waved it around the house as if quelling the smoke alarm, certain it was a warrant for my arrest. What will I do without my baby! She wailed. So, when I saw her in the flesh, slumped slightly to the side, her face blotchy with poor makeup application and rouged cheeks like a harlot, the whirlpool of my reality crashed against the rocks. The vice chancellor’s speech had just concluded, the ceremonial diploma reception was just beginning, the time for terrorism was pending for the H’s and I had no idea if Lana or Janie had succeeded in planting the detonation device.

I stood near the edge of the stage, trying to get my mother’s attention, but she had glazed over. A security guard asked me to return to the seat I didn’t have, I was in the way but I wriggled away from his grabby hands. That’s when I ran over to the line of waiting graduates and finally caught sight of Lana or Janie. She was poised behind the F’s waiting her turn, too far up the stage now for me to get to her. She had a smirk on her face. I could see my mother from the front row, the glazed over look in her eyes, how she seemed to slowly lean towards the man on her left who’s right arm he had now crossed over his lap to avoid touching this strange, perfumed woman. I imagined when the fire leapt out from the belly of the beast, how it would catch on the ethanol of her scent and burn her neck harshest where she sprayed it direct onto her skin. The same scent she’d worn my entire life and had probably expired many years past. Would it burn her thin skin enough to open an artery?

I think it was the image of my mother’s spurting neck which caused me to do what I did next. I did not know White Oak Ranch was a poultry farm and that the smell we smelled that day in Grafton, was the smell of chicken shit, and not parasitic cattle. It’s not my fault I only know the industrial smell of metal and wet. So, you see, when I ran up onto the stage, and called out bomb, I wasn’t operating on any kind of authority of my own. That the college has since banned all ceremonial gatherings, that the December graduations will now be conducted online (probably saving thousands of tons of carbon emissions) is almost of no consequence to me. That was not my cause. Lana or Janie had forced onto me a suicide vest.

When all those people stampeded out of the auditorium, and when those folks got hurt, twisted under their seats, when that older gentleman suffered a stroke, it wasn’t because I was trying to cause panic. I was genuinely trying to save their lives. I haven’t slept for days, tormented by the perpetual peel of Lana or Janie’s laugh. Didn’t people see her, the single woman or girl, driving back against the stampede?