32. Res
32
Res
O ne of the things I dabbled in but ultimately left out of my undergrad paper back in college when I was studying cults was the way in which cults and high demand groups isolated their members. Then how said members isolated their children from the world. And how it all mimicked solitary confinement. I’ve thought about going to get my master's and centering my thesis around that idea but never committed to it.
Now, if I ever go back, I’ll have some firsthand experience on both ends to include in my theoretical paper.
I don’t know how much time has passed since Samson closed the door and locked me in here. There are no windows, so there’s no reliable way for me to tell the passage of time based on the light or lack thereof. He left me with nothing to entertain myself, so there’s nothing to do to pass the time and maybe even gauge how much time has passed by the activity.
I’m just left to sit and wait until something happens. The only thing that would make this worse would be if the room were brightly lit, but thankfully, other than a lamp in the corner that I can also turn off if I want, the room is pretty dark .
Still, even with the reprieve of the dark, which allows me to at least sleep, it won't take long for the effects of solitary confinement to set in. Human beings aren’t meant to be alone. Even worse, they aren’t meant to be alone without any mental stimulation. Generally, people overestimate just how long it would take a person to start to become irritated by the isolation.
For most people.
I’m not most people.
I have experience with the isolation aspect of it. From being the weird shy girl who didn’t know how to interact with people or make friends and sat with a book. To being that same weird and shy girl who was made to sit still in long meetings with her parents while all the other children were allowed to be in the children’s room in the back because my mother didn’t think they were righteous enough. To going to public school but the other children not having anything to talk about with me because I wasn’t allowed to watch or read the same things they did or go to the same places they did. To having a nervous breakdown in my early teens because of it and then being told to get over it and get closer to God.
I also have experience anticipating an attack. Jaxson may have never had the intention to hurt me. May never have had the intention of doing anything that he wasn’t sure I wanted in the end, but those weeks of not knowing what shadow he lurked in. When he would pop up. When he was watching. What his intentions were. If his plan was to toy with me, fuck me, and then kill me .
In addition, I was regularly told from childhood that one day we’d all be persecuted for our beliefs and would have to be willing to die and suffer torture in God's name.
Combine all that; the waiting in the dark in silence for an unspecified amount of time to make me anxious is a tactic that has little effect on me by now. The boredom. The lack of sensory stimulation. The quiet. Not knowing how much time has passed. That’s a torture I’ve been trained to handle.
So rather than letting myself get anxious about when anyone is coming back, how much time is passing, or if they’re going to make me starve, I go to the bathroom, clean myself up, pee, then crawl into the small cot, pull the covers over my head, and close my eyes.
At first, I just make up stories in my head. Stories of my favorite movies, my favorite books, my favorite characters. I redo scenes over and over in my head with different lines, different outcomes, and different motivations. Just like I used to do as a lonely little girl under my parents’ control as they isolated me from everything and everyone in the name of raising a good, righteous Christian girl.
Eventually, I fall asleep.
I’m startled awake by a loud voice coming through a speaker. It takes a few seconds for me to figure out that it’s one of Jaxson’s father’s lectures over the loudspeaker, just loud enough not to damage my hearing but enough to keep me awake.
It’s a tactic used at one of those Christian "troubled teen" reform and rehabilitation centers like the one that Deacon Lashonda had apparently suggested my parents send me to before I ran off in a fit of rage and betrayal. They lock you in a room for hours and hours and play recordings of people reading the Bible, various sermons by pastors, ministers, and reverends, and inspirational audiobooks. They literally isolate and control access to what you’re allowed to hear, with the idea being that if you listen to it long enough, eventually, you’ll agree that it’s the truth.
It's no different from what a cult does on a normal occasion. Except instead of locking you into a room, they tell you not to poison your mind with any “outside opinions,” and that if you do hear an outside opinion, you should filter it with the absolute truth that they give you.
The only difference between how it normally happens is that instead of using manipulation to make me isolate myself from the outside world, the Oracle and his men are using force.
Once again, though, the joke’s on them, because I also have practice tuning out things I don’t want to hear, no matter how loud, no matter how slimy Jaxson’s father’s voice lecturing over the speaker makes me feel.
I’ve listened to many of the man’s lectures out of necessity the past few months, but this one is even more sinister than most. It’s one of those lectures on how to be a proper woman to give birth to children that will be saved by the Supreme Force whenever the apocalypse comes to wipe out the world and start it anew. One of those lectures that pretends to elevate women and be the complete opposite of sexist by saying how valuable women are, but then chides them for not living up to the expectations that the Supreme Force has for them .
If I had heard this while still at Loving Eden or even right after I’d left, I’d be angry. I’d be pissed. My blood pressure would probably skyrocket with rage. Because it’s not fair. Because no matter how much I thought that’s what I should be or wanted to be, I’d never be able to live up to that expectation. I couldn’t be what they were trying to make me, no matter how hard I tried. Because every time I tried, the goalpost was just moved that much further.
But now that I accept that all of it is made-up bullshit, I can just make a game out of poking holes in all the arguments. Sometimes, I even find a particular declaration so insane that I laugh at its absurdity.
That said, not even I’m immune to the psychological torment of hearing one man’s voice spewing hateful and made-up rhetoric. There’s no telling how long it will be before Jaxson finds me, and while it takes months and years to deprogram the human brain from psychological manipulation, it can take as little as just a few days for the manipulation to take root to begin with. So I look around the room for something I can do with my hands so I can tune out the words and focus on something else.
I look through the drawers and under the bed to see if there’s anything I can amuse myself with and find extra blankets, pillowcases, and towels. I take one of the towels and busy myself with undoing the seams around the edges. Something that will take a significant amount of time but still leave the towel usable if needed.
I’ve only managed to unravel one side of the towel before I start yawning and decide to go back to sleep again. It takes a while— a while of tossing and turning and putting the pillow over my ears to muffle the lectures while trying to daydream about anything else, so it just becomes white noise.
At some point, I manage to fall asleep only to wake up sometime later, not sure if it’s been just minutes or even hours. It’s no use trying to use the topic of the lecture to help either, because over the years, Abdiel has lost the ability to stick to a subject, and in a lecture that started out talking about women’s behavior, he can randomly start talking about foreign policy and the U.S. military.
I repeat the cycle a couple of times. I get a bottle of water, but no food.
Finally, at some point, I’m awoken from my sleep by someone entering my room, turning on lights that I hadn’t been able to see in the ceiling, and demanding that I wake up. It takes a while, considering that I’ve never been a morning person. Waking up unnecessarily early was something that I abandoned early on in leaving Loving Eden, where emphasis and importance were placed upon getting up in the morning to commune with God and read His word. To not get up early, to sleep more than necessary, was a moral failing.
I’m not sure if it’s actually early in the morning right now. For all I know, it could be mid-afternoon or late at night, but it feels like morning as my brain takes its sweet time clearing the fog of sleep to finally hear whatever the hell it is Samson has to say.
But I’ve missed everything, so I simply say, “There’s time for you to let me go. You know Jaxson is going to kill you when he finds out about this. I can tell him you helped me, and he’ll let you live.”
He probably wouldn’t let Samson live without chopping his hands off or something, but he’d probably let Samson live.
…
Maybe.
Samson laughs. “My nephew’s not going to do anything except what Daddy tells him to do.”
I’m not going to argue with him on that. Jaxson’s been too good at the loyal servant of the Oracle act. Mostly because it’s not always an act, something I clocked the first time I saw him sit at a table with his father. But I know that it’s an act enough that he’s coming to find me as soon as he notices I’m gone, even if Samson doesn’t believe it.
“And what did Daddy tell you to do?” I ask instead to get an idea of what I can expect from this encounter.
“None of the things that I want to do to you, that’s for sure. Otherwise, I’d be taking you out for a spin right now,” the man says, stalking over to me and reaching a hand out to my cheek. He stops just millimeters from my face. “I have to give it to my nephew. He sure knows how to pick them. I knew when I laid eyes on you why his father decided to snatch you from him.”
“Is that the line you drop to all the young women you want to sleep with to get them to drop their panties?” I ask.
“Now what makes you think that?”
“Because I have eyes,” I answer dryly. It wasn’t hard to notice the way one of the young cooks kept making eyes at Samson back when Jaxson’s father visited Macon.
There’s also the fact that Samson’s name came up dozens of times in the intel that Abner handed over to Jaxson. He’s gotten around, that’s for sure. It's something I wouldn’t typically judge about anyone if not for three things. One, the fact that he’s married. Two, he only seems to get around with young women who are all eighteen to twenty-two years of age compared to his sixty-five. Three, the recounts of encounters I’ve read don’t all ring as consensual, which likely means that at least some of them weren’t.
Samson says nothing to my comment and nods to a piece of paper sitting on the nightstand next to me with a pencil.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“A little test. To see how well you’ve been listening these past hours,” Samson says, careful not to give me any indication of how many hours it’s been.
I look at the sheet of paper and then back at Samson.
“Here’s how this is going to go,” he says. “You’re going to take this test. You have to get every single one right to pass.”
“And if I don’t pass?” I ask, because clearly there’s some type of punishment. Some type of torment as a consequence.
The door opens, and two men drag a blindfolded and terrified woman into the room. Her clothes are in dirty tatters, her hair is a tangled mess of mats and knots, and I can’t tell if she’s shivering from the cold or terror.
“I have it on good authority that you’re a bit of a bleeding heart. More concerned about causing someone else pain than yourself,” Samson says. “You’re going to take that test so we can see just how much you were listening. And however many you get wrong determines how many of my men are going to fuck this girl while you watch because of your failure.”
I stiffen my body, trying to control the shaking that tries to quake in my hands. I was prepared to suffer my own torment. The loud lectures over the speaker. Sleep deprivation. Isolation. Maybe even have my own body violated. But to watch someone else be punished for something I did or didn’t do? Something where the punishment far exceeds the weight of any crime in existence, let alone the crime I’m being accused of? That’s terrifying.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to touch us,” I say, managing to keep my voice from trembling. Maybe if I sound nonchalant enough, emotionally detached enough, they’ll rethink the consequences of my inevitable failure. Maybe they'll gang-rape me instead. That’s preferable to… to…
“I’m not allowed to touch you,” Samson says. “But these two-bit whores? More where this came from.”
Of course, I’m different as far as the Oracle is concerned. Even though he only cares about me as far as he can torment his own son, I’m still different from all the other women. Despite all my past sexual escapades when I went to college, the past boyfriends, the fact that he knows I’m involved with his son, I’m still somehow so special and virtuous that I don’t deserve to be raped and abused like the women whose throats he slit. I’m the Madonna. They’re the whores. The only difference between the two is that one is chosen by a man to be precious and the others are not.
But even my so-called preciousness doesn’t stop me from being subject to the whims of another man who thinks he can get away with his torment using a loophole. Because making me watch other men rape less worthy women isn’t violating me.
I pick up the pencil and throw it at him. I’m not just going to play their stupid game. I didn’t just give in when it was Loving Eden. I didn’t just give in when it was my brother. I didn’t give in when it was Jaxson, and part of me was intrigued by him and got a thrill from playing his game. I’m not going to make this so easy for Samson.
“I’m not going to play your game,” I snap. “As if you and your men aren’t getting your share of raping women before you give them over to your fucking Oracle.”
“Blasphemy against the Oracle?” Samson says with feigned offense as he picks up the pencil. Then he laughs and takes out his gun. He doesn’t point it at me. He doesn’t point it at the woman. He doesn’t point it at anyone. He just casually holds it toward the ground. Somehow, that’s more terrifying.
Finally, he growls menacingly, “You’re going to do whatever the fuck I say, or I’m going to fuck her with this gun and then empty it right into her cunt after she comes. You understand?”
It’s one of those situations where no matter what I do, the outcome of this scenario is bad. If I refuse, he rapes her with a gun and shoots her while I watch. I do the test and don’t get it one hundred percent right, and he gets as many men to rape her as I get wrong while I watch. I do the test, pass, and the girl survives to not be raped in front of me but is thrown back into whatever room she’s trapped in and maybe—more likely inevitably—be raped later.
All of the options are terrible. But there’s one option that’s less terrible than the rest.
I glare at Samson before finally holding out my hand. He places the pencil in it, and I look over at the test they have sitting in front of me. There are ten questions. I read them slowly, carefully, and one by one. By the time I finish reading them all, I realize with dread that I don’t know the answer to any of them. The questions aren’t generic religious cult-adjacent information that I could probably take a guess at and get right. They’re very specific questions that could have only been answered by listening to the lectures they blasted through the speakers to torment me. Or maybe they aren’t. I tuned out most of it after all, either through sleep or entertaining myself by picking at the seams of the towels in the room. Maybe that’s the point.
“I don’t know any of them,” I state quietly.
“What’s that?” Samson asks, though I know he heard me.
“I don’t know the answers to any of them,” I say louder.
Samson laughs and says, “That’s too damn bad.”
A total of nine more men walk into the room.
The woman is little more than a twig compared to the men that come in. Both huge and specially trained to defend the man they think is their salvation with their lives. It only takes one of the men to hold her down, and instantly, she starts struggling against him as one of the others cuts off her clothes.
Panic begins to set in me. Before, I’d been annoyed. Even indignant. But faced with another woman’s violation before my eyes, I find myself unable to just sit still silently and watch. I jump off the bed, with no thought for myself, trying to intervene. They can’t touch me. They aren’t allowed to do anything to me. I’ll protect her with my own body if I can.
Samson grabs onto my arm and holds me back .
I struggle against him, but it’s no use. The first man penetrates her so brutally that the girl chokes on a scream of pain. I turn my head, refusing to watch, but Samson grabs my head and forces it forward.
“No. This is your fault for not accepting the Oracle as your savior. As the one anointed by the Supreme Force to guide humanity,” Samson says to me.
It’s not my fault. The only ones at fault are the men gang-raping a woman all because I failed their stupid quiz. But that’s part of the psychological game. The fault is almost never the culprit but always the victim. It’s my fault for tuning out the lectures. My fault for failing the quiz. My fault for agreeing to the terms in the first place as if I had a choice.
I don’t even feel comfortable calling myself a victim because I’m not the one being gang-raped. I’m not the one being humiliated. Because I’ve been chosen by the Oracle. Elevated above most women as far as the Sovereignty is concerned, and thus my faults and sins can’t be my own. Therefore, the punishment can’t be mine either.
I wish the punishment could be mine. I would rather be the one being gang-raped, being the one held down and struggling, than let someone else be harmed for something I did. Hell, I wouldn’t even struggle if it were to save someone else. But that’s the point. Samson knows that. Jaxson’s father knows it. While I was profiling the Oracle and the Sovereignty to help Jaxson take it over, they were profiling me the entire time.
By the time the sixth man takes over, the girl has screamed herself raw, and a significant amount of blood is starting to pool on the floor between her legs .
“They’re going to kill her,” I yell, tears beginning to stream down my face, though I have too much pride to wipe them. “Stop it.”
“The time to stop anything has long passed, sweetheart. You could have stopped all this, and you didn’t.”
“It’s not like you told me you were giving me a fucking test, and if I failed it, you were going to rape a girl to death,” I snap back.
“Damn, you’ve got one hell of a mouth on you,” Samson mutters with a groan as he uses his free hand to rub his crotch. “If you weren’t the Oracle’s, I’d have you bent over that bed right now, fucking you until all you could say was my name.”
Just the thought makes me never want to have sex again.
When it’s over, the girl is still breathing as they cart her out of the room still naked, leaving her discarded clothes in the middle of the floor. My stomach lurches, and I run for the adjoining bathroom, barely making it in time to empty it's contents into the toilet.
As I lean over the toilet, the speakers begin to blast with another lecture from Jaxson’s father, and Samson yells as he leaves the room, “We’ll try this again in a few hours. Hopefully, you’ll listen this time.”