Only in waking, before her lucidity was overwhelmed and put to the service of her monomaniacal drive to subdue, could her self-reflection tiptoe into the realm of the objective. Dreaming, she was lost in a world paradoxically of her entire making and that which demanded humiliating humility; eyes wide to the day, she was prisoner to a world that must be bent to her will and was, nearly as often as she would have liked.
In the few minutes after she woke, with her fellow dreamers still dozing in the earliest dawn light, if such filtered incandescence could indeed be called light, she would scratch a few words in her diary. The book was filled with up to three sentences coupled together, preceded by a date and immediately followed by a date, excepting of course the latest entry on the ribboned page. Here and nowhere else were the observations that gave even the slightest glance into the soul that the world assumed was obliterated two decades ago when she ascended to unquestioned and nearly untested power.
When put to the test, she relished the opportunity to remind why it was unquestioned. With a visceral brutality, she exacted revenge from the soft parts of the bodies relinquished to her by upstart foolishness. Hooks, knives, and bludgeoning tools tear well into the tender and vulnerable bits of even the hardest man. Mercy would have to be found elsewhere in the hereafter. Those who fell into her hold could expect none in the rest of their mortal lives.
Proxies were deemed sufficient to exact pain enough to metastasize into fear, but on occasion she would take the opportunity to dig her own manicured nails into the flesh of a particular offender, careful to scrub the incriminating red from under the scarlet that she applied each morning. Word spreads of those wild eyes that scream of mindless, heartless rage unrestrained against its victim. But restraint remains.
“We cannot allow what happened yesterday to ever occur again. Show that kind of carelessness at your own peril,” she said simply and calmly to her inexperienced executioner as she pulled her hands out of his charge. “I will not abide the slightest mistake. I will not abide the slightest liability.”
“Of course, mistress. It will never happen again, on my life.”
“Yes.” She left the bunker with the simplicity of this interaction saying everything she needed to say and saying far more in the imagination of the man who surely would not slip in the slightest of all his future duties. Less was more.
Especial care was needed at this moment more than others. Few times in her productive career had she felt the impending retribution of justice stalking her every step, but some agency had successfully been pestering her and trying her organization’s seals. It was possible that they had already infiltrated the ranks, if not found a breach in the walls that literally and virtually encircled her compound. One man in particular, though she could not know for sure, nor could she trap him to pry the information from him directly, had shadowed her too closely. Surely he had gathered much intelligence. She feared that it would be not much longer until he made an attempt against her in the flesh.
Still, the routine of her day could hardly be interrupted for suspicions and misgivings. She had ironclad habits that could not admit external disruption or unforeseen risk any more than they could tolerate change or doubt. And so the sun rose on her lucidity and set on her willing release.
Each evening, after a slight but sumptuous dinner, after she had reviewed the events of the day and the needs of the next with her right hand, she would plug into a dreamscape with only a handful of invited guests, a list that revolved slowly and only as the risk of betrayal must be addressed.
In her dream, peopled with those whose lives she controlled entirely in the waking world, those who did not understand the true implications of what they experienced nightly, she was able to release the suffocating need for control that otherwise commanded her existence. And in that release, in what she allowed herself to do only while asleep, she found the pleasure of humility. What would be humiliating was instead a refreshment beyond possibility. In her dream, she had no need for reputation, only pure experience.
Her guests, upon waking, could not have known on what terms they had engaged her in the dream, and even if they could, it was not often that anyone remembered detail beyond a feeling, a feeling that they would too quickly have forgotten for fear of what she would do to them for the thought alone.
For her, the entire experience was release, enough to see her through each unforgiving day. Regardless of what breaks may be in the compound walls, whatever compromise in security could do for a legal case against her, it was this guiltless pleasure – where guilt gave way to self-forgiveness – she feared would be used against her to the greatest effect. It was not only her freedom that was at risk in this, but her self-assurance and pride.
So, of course, it is exactly where the agent, unseen or just unnoticed for who he was by anyone in the villa, was intent to attack. Footsteps hardly crunched against the loose and gravelly dirt that lay scattered beneath luscious grasses. He ascended as silently as one of her cats to the expansive gazebo where they all slept in the most pleasant mediterranean night. He slid through the oversized leaves that surrounded the open structure and waited patiently beneath the railing that only wrapped around the third that faced down a steeper portion of the hill.
All but one of her others had already succumbed to the drugs passing through their bodies from the centralized device, and before she turned with the last to hook themselves in as well, she admitted that she feared some faceless force that was coming to ensure an end to her reign. This was an exceptional admission, perhaps only allowed into her thoughts as sleep and release were near enough. She let her mind slip into the night beyond the wide roof of the open-air, communal bedroom.
“I can feel him. Not literally, of course. I can feel him like I can feel the starlight. He’s here, however far I see him now.
“There is no risk in the temptation each night affords. I know I am as safe asleep as I possibly could be awake. But still…
“There is something about the night. Is it the stories written across the sky? Have you ever known any constellations?”
“No, I can’t say I’ve studied the stars. Nor did anyone pass down the myths to me. My mother only told me one story. You can see the cluster now, in the East, on a line where the moon will be rising soon. She told me of a little boy who never knew his parents. He thought possibly that he was born of the moon herself. And each night he waited for her to come. And of course, throughout the month, she might spend hours with him or she may hardly peak out from behind her door or she might not come to him at all.
“The boy was well behaved and a good neighbor when the moon was full, but his friends could never find him during the new moon. He would return in a few days a little richer and a little sadder. One night he confided to the one closest to him where he had gone and from whom he stole.
“His friend scolded him for his recklessness. ‘Even when the sun has his back to us and his wife stays close to him and far from us, still the stars will witness against what is done in the dark. The night is never so abandoned that a distant light won’t force us straight and true.’
“Well, the little boy was ashamed, and that very night he prayed that the moon would forgive him, and if she could not, he wished to be taken up to her that he might at least be confronted with something true each night. And so the boy was seen no more on earth, but can now be found where the moon is sure to blot him out from time to time.”
She waited patiently while he told the myth his mother had told him, and though it disturbed her mind further, she was on the brink of sleep and as such felt forgiving enough to respond, “I would not like to dwell on these thoughts too long. I fear that the moon is coming for me the same, and I know I will not survive so bright a light. Let us join the others to avoid our mother’s rising. I am afraid of her, though I cannot but assume it will be a man who finally blots me out.”
The two stargazers stepped away from the sky to the deep shades under tree, pergola, and abundantly wide roof. As they attached themselves to the dream-machine, where those who already slept were waiting for their dreamer and her somnolent, half-hearted repentance, she said on one side of sleep, “How humiliating to finally be held for the license that’s defined one’s life! I would rather not be accosted by accountability, especially not by a mortal agent. I would die, but I would not die in his hand.”
Soon the chemicals pumped through tubes into veins and the last two were asleep, leaving only the agent to place the charges that would sever mind from body and leave it to heave against the reality that called to her from beyond death. On the other side of sleep, her thoughts continued to pursue the same theme, and she shivered with embarrassment at the idea of being so nakedly susceptible in front of someone bent on her end.
“Imagine that man being here if I was about to die!”
From the oblivion in front of her, a gruff voice echoed an invitation little less than imperative.
“Go ahead.”