THE SEX REBEL OF JESUSLAND, chapter 137

137. THE TORTURE.

She did not know how long she could hold out. She was like one of her own patients. They had hooked her up to their electricity. Two electrodes on her chest, each one clamped to a nipple, and the other clamped to her labia. They wanted to find out the name of the father of the child she killed. She was not going to tell them, no matter what they did to her. She would not betray the man that she now knew she loved.

The man sitting in front of her, who was administering the shocks, was the same man who had condemned Rachel to her Scarlet status. The man who had invented Sexual Aversion Therapy. Doctor Proctor. Apparently he had invented something else, too: flat-out torture. Perhaps he had invented the torture first, and then evolved Sexual Aversion Therapy out of it. Or perhaps he had developed his Torture Model from his Sexual Aversion Model. Perhaps torture was a natural outgrowth of Sexual Aversion Therapy.

Perhaps she deserved this. Maybe Jonathan was right after all. Sexual Aversion Therapy was medieval. Certainly this torture was. What was the difference? Both the Sexual Aversion Therapy and the Torture tried to change you against your will. Both tried to restructure the personality to be capable of something it did not want to be. Homosexuals were shocked into an acceptance of heterosexuality. She was being shocked into divulging the name of the man who had created the aborted child with her. Perhaps this was her punishment for punishing homosexuals, ironically administered by the man who had invented the whole thing.

The professor smiled as he started the shocks, set to a low strength in the beginning, which brought back riveting memories of her own treatment of her patients. The beginning shocks made her feel sexual. She thought of Adam. She made an image for herself of his penis in front of her, as though she were one of her patients confronted by his preferred penis imagery.

“Just a name, my dear. One name. I know you weren’t raped. Was it the man Adam White, your registered date at the time with the Bureau of Behavior Design and Management?”

“No, it was not him.”

“So you were betraying him and the Bureau, by sleeping with someone unregistered?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Who was this other man?”

Another shock. This was more than a tingle. “I will never say his name.”

“Why not?”

“I love him. You cannot change my love with your electricity. You cannot prosecute my love. You cannot outlaw love.”

She was saying the same words that Jonathan had used to her. Maybe Jonathan was right. Love was love, whether a man felt it for a woman or another man.

Another shock. She swallowed. It had within it a hint of pain.

“I am not trying to outlaw love. I am giving you a way of acquiring lenience for yourself. If you give us the name of this man we might decide to simply electrocute you instead of burning you at the stake.”

“This is evil. You are being evil.”

“Not at all. I’m protecting the state against evil. We must find out who this man is, so he can share in your guilt, don’t you think? That would be fair, wouldn’t it? Who is he?”

“It was you, the man was you.”

She was glad to see the professor blanch for a second. Fear was everywhere. One never knew who could accuse you, or where the most unwarranted accusation from the most unlikely accuser could lead.

“Yes, it was you,” she said again, and smiled.

Another shock. Her smile was ripped off her face as her mouth opened in agony. It was a forbidding pain, because it contained the promise of unbearable hurt in it, of the capacity to be increased, into a pain so sharp it could empty you of all will.

“I think you are lying,” said the professor, who had regained his composure as she gasped under the fresh jolt. “I think this man was Adam White. You are creating a phantom lover to protect Adam White. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Eve managed to laugh. It came out of her from a place unknown to her, a guffaw of defiance, of daring the professor to do his worst. A rebellion going on around here. Where was God? God was nowhere if He was allowing this. Along with Jesusland, God needed to be demasculinized Himself if He was letting this happen.

Another shock, and Eve felt her body convulse, her back bend, her muscles start, her whole being held in the grip of an unbearable assault on very living cell inside her. No nerve unscorched: a helplessness that was like succumbing to death itself, an extinction of her very soul.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

She did not even hear herself screaming. All she knew was the grip of something so bad, so evil, so Satan vile, that she had stepped through the gates of hell into the devil’s domain itself, and above her sat the smiling professor, a Beelzebub, an emissary of the evil that Jesusland had become.

“This man is Adam White, isn’t he?”

She shook her head. That was all she could do. She would shake her head until there was nothing left for her to shake.

I must not break. I must not give the man I love away. Now, here, I finally have something to live and die for. I have a secret to keep. Now, at last, I feel something about someone as fiercely as Jonathan felt about David when he killed his lover and himself, and as Ezra felt about me when he was so hurt and betrayed by me that he almost killed me in the grip of my betrayal of his love. Now I know what it is to feel something as real as love. Now I know I am capable of such a depth of feeling. Love is not a fiction, or a form of control. It is something worth dying for. Something worth sacrificing yourself for -- like Jonathan did, like Ezra almost sacrificed me. Now I know I love someone. Now I have to protect the man I love until the bitter end.