Analysis of ‘Animals’

Animals is a 1977 concept album by Pink Floyd. It was all conceived by bassist Roger Waters, who not only wrote almost all the music as well as all the lyrics, but also sang most of the lead vocals (except for ‘Dogs,’ much of which was sung by guitarist David Gilmour, who also co-wrote the song), and even played much of the acoustic and rhythm guitar [with Gilmour playing bass on ‘Pigs (Three Different Ones)’ and ‘Sheep‘].

Here are the lyrics to all the songs on the album.

The album’s concept, with its dogs, pigs, and sheep, was loosely inspired by George Orwell‘s Animal Farm; but don’t expect this album to be a criticism of Marxism-Leninism. These dogs don’t represent Stalin‘s secret police; these pigs are not the Bolsheviks; and these sheep, while docile and unthinkingly obedient at first, eventually rise up and crush the real enemy of modern humanity–capitalism.

Again, as with my analysis of The Dark Side of the Moon, I’m writing this as a tribute to Roger Waters, and his principled stance against such current issues as what’s happening in Syria, the West Bank and Gaza, Brazil, and now, Venezuela. Though not quite as radical a socialist as I’d prefer him to be, Waters is as opposed to the ruling class now as he was back in the 70s. His socialism is what justifies my doing a leftist analysis of Animals.

Since I wrote my analysis of Animal Farm, I’ve continued my transition away from staunch anarcho-communism and grown much more patient about when the withering away of the state should occur. Because of this change of heart, coupled with my sense of horror at what’s happened to the world since the catastrophic dissolution of the Soviet Union, I’ve come to view Orwell’s novella in a much less positive light.

This change of heart has made me want to write of Animal Farm in a far more critical way, but without hassling to update my old post. (Remember, Dear Reader: if you want to know my current views on a subject, check the dates of my posts; my views evolve and change all the time, so if my newer posts contradict anything I said in the older ones, you should know which views to judge me by now.) So I’ll be critical of Orwell here, if indirectly.

Tankie readers, I give you my anti-Animal Farm!

The cover colour photo of Animals shows a pig balloon floating over the Battersea Power Station. Black and white photos on the inner sleeve show more of the power station, as well as a bigger image of the pig balloon, a gate, and barbed wire.

So instead of the private property of a farm, which in Orwell’s allegory becomes the so-called state capitalist property of the Stalinist pigs, we have the actual state capitalist property of the bourgeois UK government, whose pigs, gates, and barbed wire seem to say “Keep out!” (as the sign of an owner of private property would say) to the disenfranchised rest of us.

These images are ominous: though state-owned enterprises can be for the public good, they can also be privatized. The cover of Animals seems to be warning us of what will happen to such things as the welfare state if people like Thatcher are allowed to have their way…as, indeed, they eventually would, so many years following the release of the album. Don’t let pigs gain ascendancy over public services!

The ‘Pigs On the Wing‘ songs were written for Waters’s then just-married wife Carolyne Christie, though their message of love can easily be extended to a general sense of comradeship.

If we don’t care about each other, we’ll just “zig-zag our way,” that is, move about aimlessly, with no sense of direction. “The boredom and pain” of alienation and ennui will have us only “occasionally glancing up through the rain,” that is, rarely noticing the cause of our woes.

Note how irregular the rhythm of Waters’s acoustic guitar strumming gets at this point, ultimately switching from its 3+3+2 subdivision of (2 bars of ) 4/4 at the beginning to 3/4 at the end, when he sings of who the cause of our pain is: the “pigs on the wing,” who cause our irregularity, our zig-zagging.

The pigs are flying because they are the ugly beasts at the top of the political and economic ladder, like that pig balloon on the album cover. They’re also “on the wing” because the ideal they represent will come true when pigs fly.

…and what is that ideal? Not full communism, for recall, this album is the anti-Animal Farm. These pigs’ ideal is ‘free market’ capitalism, already championed in the mid-1970s by such people as Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, at the time the Leader of the Opposition. This ideal would quickly degenerate into the ugly reality of neoliberalism, the effects of which we’ve been suffering increasingly for the past forty years.

The dogs in Animal Farm, as I mentioned above, were the NKVD, whose excesses during the 1930s (unjust incarcerations and executions) are blamed on Stalin, but were largely the fault of Yagoda and Yezhov.

The dogs of Animals, however, are the dogs of capitalism, not communism. These bourgeois barkers are those of the middle and upper classes. Those who “can work on points of style, like the club tie, and the firm handshake” are clearly those of the upper classes, who “as [they] get older…in the end [they’ll] pack up and fly down south.” The rest of the lyrics can equally apply to all those from the lower-middle to upper classes.

Since the dogs of Animal Farm are understood to be the secret police of the proletarian state, the dogs of Animals can be seen to represent, at least in part, the police of the bourgeois state, loyal to their upper class masters to the point of fawning, while vicious to, and growling at, the working class.

The petite bourgeois, “when…on the street,” has “got to be able to pick out the easy meat,” that is, find good opportunities in his upwardly-mobile ambitions, and “strike when the moment is right without thinking.” Indeed, not thinking about the workers he’s exploiting. Then, if he’s one of the small minority of petite bourgeois who rise up the ranks of the rich, he “can work on points for style.”

The back-stabbing capitalist has “to be trusted by the people that [he lies] to.” These people include not only the masses of exploited workers, but also the traumatized veterans of imperialist wars, all those people deceived by the corporate media, and also the petite bourgeoisie, whose hopes for advancement are frustrated by the super-rich’s use of the state to keep down the competition. “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, p. 929) Capitalism is a dog eat dog world.

It’s significant that musically, the whole song has a sad tone to it, for the rule of the bourgeois makes sadness, depression, and alienation all epidemic problems. Gilmour’s harmonized guitar leads imitate the sad howling of lonely dogs, who symbolize the alienated people of all classes.

You could be a worker, a petite bourgeois, a cop, or a billionaire, and “it’s going to get harder…as you get older.” And while you may be rich enough to afford to “pack up and fly down south,” your wealth won’t save you from having to suffer what so many of the rest of us suffer, to “hide your head in the sand, just another sad old man, all alone and dying of cancer.”

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall results in financial crises when the capitalist will “lose control” and “reap the harvest [he has] sown.” One day, the crisis will be too great to recover from, and it will be “too late to lose the weight [he] used to throw around. So, have a good drown,” bourgeoisie, “as you go down all alone, dragged down by the stone.” That stone dragging down the self-destructing, suicidal bourgeoisie is tied to the same dialectical wheel that ended feudalism; that echoing “stone, stone, stone,…” symbolizes the cyclical turning of that wheel.

Gilmour has sung so far; now, Waters takes over the lead vocals. He is singing in the voice of one beginning to develop class consciousness, for he’s “confused,” sensing he’s “just being used.” He has to “shake off this creeping malaise” of alienation, and “find [his] way out of this maze,” the base and superstructure created by the ruling class.

He tells all those without class consciousness that they are “deaf, dumb, and blind…pretending that everyone’s expendable, and no one has a real friend.” The pro-capitalist dogs of class war, regardless of their social class or occupation (businessman, cop, soldier), justify their defence of society’s class structure, for they “believe at heart everyone’s a killer.”

The pro-capitalist has this cynical view of the world because he “was born in a house full of pain,…was told what to do by the man,…was broken by trained personnel, [and]…was fitted with collar and chain,” for he’s been a good, obedient dog who never questioned his indoctrination that there is no alternative. As a result, he “was only a stranger at home,” for that’s how deep worker alienation cuts.

And when the capitalist mode of production finally collapses under its own contradictions, the obedient dogs of the bourgeoisie will be “dragged down by the stone” with their masters.

“Pigs (Three Different Ones)” takes on three political influences in England that Waters had, and still has, no love for.

It’s hard to know specifically who Waters had in mind for the first one, a “big man, pig man, ha-ha, charade you are.” As a pig, he’s a politician, by reference to the Bolshevik pigs in Animal Farm; but since this is Waters’s anti-capitalist allegory, and since he’s probably thinking about a 1970s British politician, it’s safe to assume he’s thinking about a right-winger.

Allied to the above is the notion of ‘war pigs,’ an expression that, by the late 70s, was already popularized by the Black Sabbath song. So I’ll venture to guess that, whoever this pig was, he was probably hawkish and imperialistic, hoping to get his filthy hands on the natural resources of an exploited Third World country, hence the pig’s “digging.” “What do you hope to find?” Waters asks, “down in the pig mine.”

The second pig seems to be Margaret Thatcher, who at the time of Animals‘ release wasn’t yet prime minister, but who as Leader of the Opposition was already up to no good. We often think of the rise of neoliberalism as something that began in the 1980s, with her and Reagan; but the precursors of it were already going on in a big way from the mid-70s, after the oil crisis caused many to consider Keynesian economics to have run its course.

The influence of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys was already felt in Chile, after the September 11th 1973 coup replaced democratically-elected Salvador Allende with authoritarian dictator Augusto Pinochet. A popular myth claims that the “free market” policies of Pinochet‘s regime revived the Chilean economy, but the only beneficiaries were the ruling class. Their benefit, nonetheless, was enough to encourage ideologues like Thatcher to apply “free market” capitalism to the UK and the rest of the world.

In making Animals, Waters was being prescient in a way I’m sure that today, with neoliberalism having metastasized into a global evil, he would wish he’d gotten horribly wrong.

Many, if not most people, in the UK and around the world would agree that Thatcher was a “fucked up old hag.” As one who wanted to maximize privatization, she is aptly described in the song as a “bus stop [i.e., stop the progressive movement of public services] rat bag” [i.e., the filth and squalor that results from ending those public services]. She radiated “cold shafts of broken glass,” and she did “like the feel of steel” (the term Iron Lady was already being used for her).

Like the first pig, she was “good fun with a hand gun,” for she would soon prove to be an imperialist, too; also, she’s “nearly a laugh, but…really a cry”: we should be laughing at clowns like her, but what they do is so hurtful, we can only cry. The surprise in how these ideologues’ asininity actually hurts is felt in the brief switch from 4/4 to one bar of 3/4 on hearing Waters sing “cry,” then back to 4/4.

The third pig was Mary Whitehouse, an old prude who protested against the growing permissiveness of British society. Again, her wish to restore a repressive sexual morality would have been laughable if not for her later political alliances with highly-placed conservatives like Thatcher. The ruling class wants to control us in every way, including our sexuality.

Today, however, the ruling class controls our desires in the opposite way, by overindulging us through the media and markets, so we’ll be too distracted to think critically about the system we’re all stuck in. Recall my use of the ouroboros as a symbol of the dialectical relationship of opposites: as regards sexuality, the serpent’s biting head of repression (Whitehouse) shifts over to its opposite, the bitten tail of such things as addiction to internet porn, strippers, prostitutes, etc. We think about fucking, so we won’t think about how we’re all being fucked.

“Do you feel abused?” Waters taunts Whitehouse, then pants lewdly into the microphone, as if watching a porno. She’d have us “keep it all on the inside.” She’s “nearly a treat,” another sexual taunt at her priggishness, but she, like Thatcher et al, is “really a cry.”

Nick Mason punctuates the beat in this song by hitting a cowbell, an ironic allusion to the cows in Animal Farm, and perhaps another jab at Thatcher and Whitehouse. In the middle section, Richard Wright plays a hypnotic melody on the organ, later adding a synth to it: B-E-F#-G-F#-E-F#-G-B-E-F#-G-F#-E-F#-G-C-E-F#-G-F#-E-F#-G-C-E-F#-G-F#-E-F#-G…,” etc., suggesting the way these politicians hypnotize us all into going along with their agendas.

Switching roles, lead guitarist Gilmour plays sad bass licks over the sad E minor/C major progression that bassist Waters strums on the rhythm guitar (with a delay effect), and with Wright’s mesmerizing keyboard melody. Elsewhere, Gilmour uses a talk box to imitate pigs’ oinks and grunts as he plays lead guitar licks. It’s so sad being mesmerized by political pigs.

Waters’s “Sheep” aren’t the usual passive type, at least not by the end of the song. They’re like the rebelling animals at the end of the CIA-financed cartoon version of Animal Farm, which was an egregious bit of anti-Soviet propaganda going even further than Orwell had intended. Thus, the irony of this anti-capitalist song, when compared with that cartoon, is a masterstroke for Waters.

At first, the sheep are like most of us, “only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.” We all suffer the discontents of neoliberalism, but many of us still think that either voting Trump out of office, or pushing for still more “free market” deregulation, or voting in Labour in the UK, or voting in anybody, in and of itself will solve the problem. “You better watch out! There may be dogs about.” Remember to be careful not to let slip the dogs of class war.

Waters has looked over the Jordan River, and instead of seeing the band of angels coming for to carry the evangelical Christian Zionists home, he’s seen the oppression of the Palestinians. This is “what…you get for pretending the danger’s not real.”

When, “meek and obedient, you follow the leader…into the valley of steel”–the steel of the Iron Lady who helped bring about the neoliberalism that has resulted in an epidemic of homelessness in the UK, San Francisco, and elsewhere–you finally have “terminal shock in your eyes,” and you realize that “this is no bad dream.”

Waters warned us about people like Thatcher decades ago. In allowing May‘s ascendancy, we proved we never heeded this warning. The scraping on the dubbed strings of Waters’s rhythm guitar suggests that “terminal shock.”

In the midsection of the song, we hear a bassline and some keyboard harmonizing (based on a D diminished seventh chord) that seem inspired by the Doctor Who theme. Do we need The Doctor to intervene and wake us complacent sheep up?

Also during this section of the song, we hear Waters speaking through a vocoder and parodying Psalm 23, indicating that Church authoritarianism has been used to help the ruling class, that is, people like Whitehouse helping people like Thatcher. Is The Doctor one of those sons of God who, in consorting with the daughters of man, will do the forbidden mixing of the human and divine worlds (symbolic language for sharing the power of the wealthy with the poor), and thus give us the strength to revolt against the ruling class?

The rich would naturally see such a development as a great evil; for when the revolution comes, and we erstwhile timid sheep have fallen “on [the bourgeois’s] neck with a scream,” we “wave upon wave of demented avengers” will have finally replaced the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with that of the proletariat.

Then, when “the [capitalist] dogs are dead,” and any petite bourgeois puppies hope to revive the profit motive, we’ll warn them to “stay home and do as you’re told,” for the workers will have power over the rich…for a change. The surviving bourgeois wannabes will have to “get out of the road if [they] want to grow old.”

The song ends with Gilmour strumming triumphant chords high up the guitar neck in the key of E major, then over background progressions of D major and E major (with a bass pedal point in octaves of E), and also E major and A major.

“Pigs on the Wing, Part Two” reaffirms that we care for each other, now that we’ve defeated the capitalists and done away with the attendant alienation. We thus “don’t feel alone, or the weight of the stone.”

Waters also acknowledges that he’s a dog himself, as a wealthy member of a successful 70s band…and as the then-spouse of a British aristocrat! (He thus seems, as a critic of capitalism, to be acknowledging his ‘canine nature’ in anticipation of the old tu quoque retort.)

To be fair, though, we all need a home, even the bourgeois; accordingly, socialists strive to provide homes for everyone. “A shelter from pigs on the wing,” those dangerous ideologues who try to charm us with the empty promises of the “free market,” promises that will come true only when pigs grow wings.

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Twelve

[some sexual content]

The next day, at lunchtime, Petunia was in the cafeteria, at a table with no one she’d ever chatted with before. Sam, however, was sitting at a table next to hers, him directly behind her. They turned and looked at each other without saying anything, for fear of the Capitol staff noticing. 

As she was eating, she noticed the door opening, with three men in suits coming in: she recognized all three of them—‘Free’ Mark, with Ken Maynard and Ricardo Davis! 

Sam looked up at them, too. “Maynard,” he mumbled, loud enough for Petunia to hear. 

A woman sitting across from Petunia looked over at the men and slurred, “Davis.” 

Petunia, in her drugged-out state, felt herself realizing again, as if for the first time, what she’d learned the first time Mark took her into a Capitol building in New York: those three men were running a fraudulent human trafficking business the whole time.  

********************* 

Two hours later, Petunia was given Creeps to clean and deodorize her vagina and anus, as well as a green Creep in her vagina to make her passive and docile. An orange Creep went up her asshole to make her cheerful, sociable, and horny (it lubricated her anus, and caused her vagina to lubricate itself). 

She went into a VIP room, completely nude as usual, and with erect nipples. Two men in suits were there waiting for her: Davis and Maynard. 

“Hi, Petunia,” Maynard said, stroking her hair. 

“Long time, no fuck,” said Davis, caressing a breast.  

She just stood there with a grin so fake that the men knew it was…not that they cared at all. 

Oh, well, she thought; time to service these two bastards again. My body’s about to betray my soul…again. 

They unzipped their pants and pulled their hard cocks out. Maynard lay on his back on the bed, taking her by the hand and having her get on him on all fours. Davis got behind her, aiming his cock at her ass. Maynard slipped his cock in her pussy, and the fucking began. 

“You sure found…a winner…in her, Ricardo,” Maynard said. “Unh! It’s not easy…getting…white girls…for Capitol.” 

“No,” Ricardo grunted. “But she…sure made it…easy. Ah!” 

“She threw her…nakedness…at us. What a…slut. Oh!” 

“Got her…to do my…secretary…fantasy…and everything.” 

“She must’ve…been desperate…for work. Unh!” 

“Yeah…sat on my lap…and cried…a whole sob story…about…running away…from home…in Vancouver…perfect prey…knew you’d…like her.” 

“Yeah…I had her…goin’ about nude…everywhere…showin’ off…that body…to everybody…our business…associates…in the hotel rooms…on our floor…watching her…in the hall. Oh!” 

“You even…tested her…for lesbian sex, right? Ah!” 

“Yeah, with my…dyke maid…Rosa…filmed it, too…for all our…investors…to see…Ooh!” 

“No wonder…’Free’ Mark…was so…impressed…Unh!” 

All Petunia could do was listen in horror at the whole conspiracy confessed to her, knowing that—even without the Creeps controlling her mind—she could do nothing about these two creeps fucking her, or that other creep, ‘Free’ Mark. Would Guy and Thea help? If not, then what? 

The men came at almost the same time, staining her buttocks and vulva. Then they zipped up their pants and left. 

She just sat on the bed in a daze. 

Will I ever be in full control of my body again? she wondered as a tear ran down her cheek. 

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Eleven

Guy left Capitol and, on his way to the bus stop, he got out his cellphone and called Thea. 

“Hello?” she said. “Guy, where are you?” 

“You were right, Thea,” he said, trembling from knowing how mad she was going to get knowing he’d been with Petunia again. 

“About Petunia?” she asked. “Where are you?” 

“Going to the bus stop by Capitol.” 

“You didn’t screw her again, did you?” 

“Yes, I’m sorry.” He was choking back sobs. 

“You asshole! Just like Dad, and his whore-chasing! Like father, like son! Why can’t you ever hear anything I try to teach you?” 

“I learned the truth from her myself! I felt her write HELP on my leg as she was…sucking me off.” 

“Just like Dad! Always thinking with your dick. Always being a dick!” 

“She likes me, Thea; she told me.” 

“As I said: thinking with your dick, and being a dick.” 

“I asked her if she hated me for fucking her, and she told me, NO.” 

“Capitol makes her say that, Guy.” 

“She didn’t say it. She wrote it on my leg.” 

“In your dreams, Guy. There’s no way she’d like a customer.” 

“No, really. She—“ 

“Would you shut up? I got a text message from someone who works in Capitol. They say they have information I need to prove that what’s going on there is criminal. They said to go to the Eastville Shopping Mall at 8:00, in front of the Starbucks. You’re coming with me, as part of your redemption.” 

“OK, I will.” 

“Don’t disappoint me again, and don’t fuck Petunia anymore!” 

She hung up. 

******************** 

That night, Thea and Guy waited and waited for Jim. 

“Where is this person?” she asked. “It’s 8:30.” 

“Do you suppose Capitol found out about their disloyalty?” Guy asked. 

“Don’t say it, Guy,” she said. “Don’t even think it.” 

******************** 

Mark was in his office. He took out his cellphone. It was 7:00. 

“Jim?” he said into his phone after dialing. “Come to my office.”  

After hanging up, he clicked on an app. He clicked ‘Creeps’, then ‘Yellow’, then ’10’. He got up and walked out the door, then stood in front of it, where he had two big, musclebound men ready. Jim rushed over within five minutes. 

“You wanted to see me, Boss?” he asked with a frown at the sight of the other two men. 

“Yes,” Mark said. “Let’s take a walk.” 

“Well, I, uh, have to go somewhere,” Jim said in a shaky voice. “S-some im-important business…has come up.” 

“Oh, don’t worry,” Mark said. “We’ll be finished with you soon.” 

“W-what’s up?” 

“Jim, you’ve been working here for almost half a year now. We got you out of jail with a referral from the McCluskey family, whom you worked for in that drug deal when you got busted. They said you were 100% loyal.” 

“Yeah, that’s me. Loyal.” 

“You know the nature of this business is, well, controversial. Not everybody likes what we do here.” 

“Yeah, like that woman and her brother who came here today. Good thing we were able to stop her from getting any proof about Petunia.” 

“But giving Thea Cummings proof is only a phone call away, isn’t it?” 

“Not if you don’t have her phone number.” 

“I had her number written on a piece of paper in my office this morning. Then you came in, and we chatted about getting Petunia ready for Thea and her brother. I left the office for a few minutes. When I came back and you’d left, I noticed that piece of paper was gone.” 

“Yeah, but other people come in and out of your office all the time.” Jim laughed nervously. “It wasn’t me. Anybody could’ve taken it.” 

They had reached an area in the hall with access to the ‘escape’ tunnels. The musclemen pulled off a screen high on a wall, showing an entrance. 

“True, the missing paper alone wasn’t proof of your theft,” Mark went on. “But it was enough to make me suspect you. You must know I have technology to trace and track all phone calls and text messages within my sphere of influence, right?” 

“Yeah, but—“ 

“Look at this,” Mark said, showing Jim a record, on Mark’s phone, of Jim’s text message to Thea. 

“Mark, I—“ 

“Strip, Jim. Down to your bare ass. Then crawl in.” 

“I’m not just some girl from the Third World, or a runaway from out of town. I have family and friends. They’ll look for me—“ 

“What? Here? The fundamentalist family you ran away from when you were a teen would disown you in a second if they knew you’d been working here. The McCluskey family would never help you or your family if they knew you’d tried to rat me out. Loyalty is very important to them, and to their reputation. Boys, strip him naked and shove him in.” 

As one of the musclemen held Jim and the other pulled his pants down, he struggled and said, “What about when my friends in town ask where I am?” 

“What about them?” Mark asked. “How will they be able to prove what really happened? As far as they’ll be concerned, you were fired, then you disappeared. We can forge a suicide e-mail for you. It’ll be easy to believe you killed yourself, since you have no future with a criminal record, without even any mafia willing to give you a job. In any case, the yellow Creeps will burn your insides so thoroughly, along with your face, and even your teeth and your fingertips, it’ll be impossible to identify the corpse as yours, if it’s ever even found. You know what this technology can do, just as Thea and Guy now know, since we traced your sending them a downloadable file explaining how Creeps work.” 

Jim was completely naked now, and the musclemen shoved him into the tunnel entrance. “Please, Mark. Don’t do this!” he screamed. 

“You should have thought of that before you chose to be disloyal to the company,” Mark said. “The McCluskey family surely taught you about the importance of loyalty, didn’t they?” 

The musclemen put the screen back on, bolting it shut. Jim frantically crawled through the tunnel, knowing there was no escape, but desperate to distance himself from the squeaking noises of the Creeps coming from behind. 

Mark and his men chuckled as they heard Jim’s shuffling and panting from out in the halls. They followed him so they could continue hearing his struggle to survive, as hopeless as it was, through the screens that appeared every twenty feet down the halls.  

All customers were in soundproofed rooms enjoying Commodities on the other side of the building, so Mark had no fear of anyone hearing Jim’s screams. He just kept crawling and crawling, his heart beating faster as he heard the screeching Creeps’ getting louder and louder, closer and closer to his ass. 

Just then, he felt one crawling up the base of his foot, from his big toe, along his sole up to his heel. The tickling sensation made him jerk his leg, banging his foot hard on the floor of the tunnel. The sharp pain added to his confusion as a second, then a third, then a fourth and a fifth Creep ran up his legs. 

Amid the noises of the Creeps’ screeching and his own screams, he could still hear the laughing of Mark and his men. The Creeps scurried towards his buttocks, which he tried to close, but, too late: one squeezed its way into his asshole. Now his head and limbs were heard banging all over the walls in a rapid iteration of knocks. Jim’s murderers’ laughs got louder. 

“He’s got one up his ass by now, he must have,” Mark laughed. “Got a Creep wiggling up your rectum yet, Jim?” 

“Fuck you! Bastards! Aaaah!!!” Jim screamed. 

The burning inside began. 

Jim felt it first as a small ball of fire in his intestines; the ball grew bigger and hotter, burning through the intestinal mucous membrane and cutting into the surrounding organs, including his appendix, his spleen, and his stomach. 

Two other yellow Creeps got into his body: one slipped into his right ear; the other went in his mouth, down his throat, and into his lungs. The first burned its way into his brain, then burned his eyeballs out, hollowing the sockets; it also burned through his nasal cavity, burning off his nose, and burned into his mouth, destroying his teeth. The other Creep burned out of his lungs and reached his heart. Other Creeps burned into his bloodstream, the burning travelling through his arms, hands, and fingers, destroying his fingerprints. 

Now his body lay motionless. 

********************* 

“He’s not coming,” Thea said. “It’s almost 9:00. Let’s go home.” 

She and Guy left the shopping mall. 

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Ten

[sexual content]

A man took Petunia back to her room. 

“Strip,” the man said. 

As she was unbuttoning her white dress shirt, she thought, that lawyer and government worker paid no attention to my writing ‘Help me’ on their hands…as I knew they wouldn’t. I’ve seen them walking about here before: they must be working for Mark and Capitol in one way or another. 

She was in only her white bra and panties now. The man was ogling her with a smile. 

“Keep going,” he said. “Let’s see the rest of you.” 

She removed her bra, showing him her firm little breasts and thinking, I saw Guy’s eyes: he doesn’t believe Thea, either. He believes I like to fuck the clients here. I’m trapped here. She won’t be able to get me out. I’ll have to escape myself, or die trying. 

She’d pulled down the panties, and her bare feet kicked them aside. The man looked up and down at her nakedness. 

“Good,” he said. “We have a customer waiting for you.” 

**************** 

Thea went to a Starbucks, sat at a table, and stared at the Frappucino she’d bought. Guy didn’t leave with her from Capitol: he said he wanted to meet up with a friend. 

What am I going to do? she thought. I can’t get anyone to believe me, not even Guy. When I got in my car, I saw him going to the bus stop, so I guess he isn’t going back into Capitol. He’d better not be: I’ll kill him if he fucks Petunia again. But what can I do? I can’t stop him, or any guy from paying to have her. 

Suddenly, a recording of the chorus of ‘Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves’, by the Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin, was playing on her phone, telling her she had a text message: 

I work for Capitol. I can help you. Let’s meet in the Eastview Shopping Mall tonight, in front of the Starbucks. Will you be available at 8:00? I can be there then. 

Whoever this was didn’t leave a name, she thought. He must know it’s dangerous to snitch on the company. He must be a he: other than the enslaved prostitutes, what woman would ever work in such a degrading place? Ms. Kay must not know how corrupt LeSaffre is. 

Thea replied to the text message with, “I’ll see you there at 8:00 tonight.” 

***************** 

Jim read her reply on his cellphone. He thought, I’m a dead man for doing this; Mark surely is tracing my calls and text messages. But I can’t live with myself for doing what I’ve been doing. 

He watched the video screen showing the room nude Petunia went into. Then he saw the man about to have her enter. Jim’s eyes lit up as soon as he saw his face. 

Thank God they put an orange Creep up her pussy to make her compliant with him, Jim thought. I don’t wanna speak her words for her, the way I feel. Can’t believe that prick wants to fuck her so soon after that fake meeting. 

“So good to see you again, Petunia,” Guy said as he unzipped his pants. “I knew you liked your job.” 

She looked up at him as she knelt and took his cock in her mouth. He looked down and saw tears in her eyes. 

“What the…?” he said, then he moaned from the wet massaging of her lips and tongue. He raised his head and closed his eyes. 

She put her hand up his left pant leg. He felt her finger tickling his leg, rubbing a straight line down in a stroke. 

“Oh, don’t do that, baby,” he said, then he felt two more strokes, a short horizontal one, then another top-down one: an H. “Wait…oh!” Her writing and sucking were distracting him from the experiencing of either. “H…ah!…E…oh!” 

She wrote L…P, then H-E-L-P again. 

“Holy…shit!” he grunted. His heart was racing from both the feeling of her flickering tongue stimulating the underside of his cock, and from putting the evidence all together: her robot-like talking in the room with Mark, Thea, Kay, and Brennan; her writing finger; and the tears in her eyes. His brain was going in opposite directions—pleasure and guilt from what her mouth was doing. 

He came in her mouth, and saw some of it drip down her chin; but he also admitted to himself that he saw the tears in her eyes, at last, and he felt ‘HELP’ written on his leg again. 

“Thea…was right,” he panted as he put his dick back in his pants and zipped them up. He fell to his knees and faced Petunia eye to eye. Now he had tears in his eyes to mirror hers. “I’m so sorry, Petunia.” 

He wrapped his arms around her and fought to refrain from weeping. She put her arms around him and held him close. 

“You must hate me,” he whispered into her ear, burying his wet face into her neck. Now her finger was writing on his arm. 

N-O. 

“You…don’t?” he asked. “After what I’ve done?” 

N-O. 

“Can’t you speak?” he whispered in her ear. 

N-O. 

Keeping his mouth close to her ear and his voice as soft as he could, he said, “We’ve got to get you out of here.” 

Y-E-S. (Her hand was always shaky…) 

“And you like me, even though I took advantage of you here?” 

Y-E-S. (…yet her finger wrote with sufficient clarity.) 

“Did Capitol…drug you in some way?” 

Y-E-S. 

Of course, he thought; her shaky writing finger, struggling to communicate with me, proves how little control she has over her own body. “They’re controlling what you say, what you do?” 

Y-E-S. 

His erection was returning. Her writing finger is expressing her real thoughts, he thought; if she insists she still likes me, even after fucking her twice, maybe she’ll be OK with a third fuck. “They’re watching, and listening, aren’t they?” This was his softest volume yet. 

Y-E-S. 

“They’ll get suspicious if we don’t fuck, right?” 

Y-E-S. 

“Since you like me, even after what I did…and I feel like an asshole for asking, but I’ll respect your wishes if you answer no. Is it OK if we fuck again?” 

Y-E-S. 

“Really? You mean that?” 

Y-E-S. 

He looked in her eyes and smiled. Her tears were gone. Her smile seemed less artificial. 

“OK,” he said, unzipping his pants and pulling out his hard cock again. “I’ll be gentle. I promise.” 

He slid his cock inside her slowly, her sighing softly. As he pushed in and pulled out, he panted these words: “I’ll talk…to Thea…about…a plan…to get…you out…of here. Unh!” 

******************* 

“Good, they’re fucking again,” Free Mark said to Jim as they watched Guy and Petunia in the Regulating Room. “I didn’t like that pause between the blow job and now.” 

“You think he was whispering a secret message in her ear?” Jim asked. 

“It’s very possible,” Free Mark said. “When I walked in here, right when he came in her mouth, he didn’t look happy.” 

“After he leaves, I can play back the recording at a high volume so we can know if he said anything to her that we need to worry about,” Jim said. 

“I don’t think we need to worry about that right now,” Mark said. “For the moment, he seems to be just enjoying himself.” The only thing I need to worry about at the moment is that text message my computer caught you sending to Thea Cummings, he thought.

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Nine

Guy and Thea sat in ‘Free Mark’ LeSaffre’s office with a woman lawyer and a government official, while Mark was out fetching Petunia. They’d been waiting for some time. 

“She’ll be drugged,” Thea said. “That’s why this is taking so long.” 

“We’ll need proof of that,” the lawyer said. 

“That won’t be easily given,” the government man said. 

Just then, Mark returned with Petunia, who for once was fully dressed. She sat on a chair beside Mark, and they were facing the other four. She seemed at peace. 

“OK, Petunia,” Mark said. “I understand you know Thea and Guy Cummings here, is that right?” 

“Yes,” Petunia said in a clipped voice. Oh, God, she thought; I want to scream out for them to help me, but I can’t even twitch! 

“Beside them are Ms. Patricia Kay, their lawyer, and Mr. Jules Brennan, who works for the Ministry of Labour,” Mark told her. “They have some questions for you about your work here.” 

“Are you happy here?” Ms. Kay asked. 

“Yes,” Petunia said with a smile that seemed fake only to Thea. “Everything’s OK.” Everything in me wants to yell, ’NO’, but this thing they put in my brain has my mouth paralyzed, except for what they want me to say, she thought; Can’t I even get a teardrop to roll down my cheek? 

“Are you sure, Petunia?” Thea asked, looking deep into her eyes.  

“Sure, why not?” Petunia said, still smiling. “The pay is great, they provide technology to ensure no spreading of STDs, and we have full protection against abusive clients. We’re fine here. I’ve never had such job security anywhere.” My body is a traitor to my very soul…and I can’t stop it! 

“Really?” Guy said. She may have acknowledged having known me, but she looks at me as if she’s never met me, he thought; her speaking sounds kind of robot-like, too. 

“Petunia,” Thea said, “hold Ms. Kay’s hand, and Mr. Brennan’s, too.” Her whole manner seems mechanical, she thought; her voice sounds almost like a recording. 

Petunia put her hands in those of Kay and Brennan. Please, you two, Petunia thought; feel my fingers writing ‘Help me.’ 

“What’s the purpose of this, Ms. Cummings?” Mark asked. “Is Petunia going to have a seance or something with Ms. Kay and Mr. Brennan?” 

“Yes, I don’t see why this is necessary, either,” Kay said. 

“Are we supposed to be turned on by Petunia’s tickling fingers?” Brennan asked. 

“Pay careful attention to how her fingers are moving,” Thea said. “It’ll all make sense to you in a minute.” 

“All I feel is random tickling,” Kay said. 

I knew they wouldn’t admit to feeling a message, Petunia thought as she continued trying to write; They’re on Mark’s payroll. 

“I think Ms. Cummings is wasting our time,” Mark said. 

“She likes to fuck, Thea,” Guy said. “I know.”  

She scowled at him, then looked with pleading eyes at Brennan and Kay. 

“Mr. Brennan! Ms. Kay!” Thea said. “She’s writing in your hands! H-E-L-P-U-S. Don’t you feel it? Haven’t you noticed how fake her emotions are, how robot-like she’s acting? Capitol has her drugged in some way. She’d never willingly become a prostitute! I know Petunia! I’ve known her for years. This isn’t the real her!” 

“Really, Ms. Cummings?” Mark said with a sneer. 

Brennan and Kay looked at Thea with cool incredulity. 

“You two are on LeSaffre’s payroll,” Thea said, then got up. 

You’re right, Petunia thought; and I can’t say a word to confirm it. 

“Oh, come on, Thea,” Guy said. “Be reasonable. There’s no proof of what you’re saying.” 

She glared at him, then walked out of the office and slammed the door. 

“Look, I’m sorry,” Guy said, getting up. “My sister’s real emotional sometimes. She can’t accept Petunia’s life choices here.” He looked over at Petunia, who showed no concern for Thea, but just stared blankly at a wall. “I’ll go get her.” He left the room. 

Finally, a tear ran down Petunia’s cheek. 

**************** 

“Good work,” a man in the shadows of the Regulating Room said to Jim, who’d been speaking into a microphone remotely connected with a microscopic device touching Petunia’s brain, thus making her say his words. The device had been put into her in a Creep. 

“To be honest, I’m not sure if I feel comfortable making her say that,” Jim said. “She’s tried to escape twice, remember.” 

“Oh, come on!” the man said. “I knew Petunia, too…carnally. I had her in a hotel room. As Thea’s brother told her, she likes to fuck. What you had her say to them was practically the truth. Creeps do ensure no spreading of STDs, we do protect our Commodities from abusive clients, and her youth, beauty, and skill in bed will ensure her job security. Remember, we sic yellow Creeps only on undesirable Commodities—older ones, ones that don’t make us a profit anymore, and—“ 

“But this is wrong, Mr. Da—“ Jim said. 

“And we also use the yellow ones on disloyal employees.” 

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Eight

“Why do I have to go, too?” Guy asked. 

“To be an additional witness,” Thea said. “To add credibility to our case when the government official and lawyer do their investigation. Besides, you have to redeem yourself.”  

“Redeem myself?” Guy asked with a sneer. 

“Yes,” Thea said, grabbing his arm so he wouldn’t walk out of his bedroom. “I have proof that Petunia is being held there against her will. She used her finger to write a message on my arm. She did it with great effort, but she did it several times, enough times that I could tell there was a deliberate message she was giving me.” 

“What was the message?” 

“Help me—help us, I should say. She wrote the same thing, H-E-L-P-U-S, over and over again. The exact same strokes, so I know it was deliberate, not random tickling or something.” 

“Help us?” He remembered her ticking his arm with her finger. 

“Yes, and it’s obvious what she meant by that. She isn’t the only victim of human trafficking there. When I looked through the computer pictures of all the women—some men, too—all of them naked, I noticed that most of them were either black, dark-skinned East Asians, or Latinos. A few First Nations, too. Capitol is obviously luring poor people from the Third World and making them prostitutes, with the fake promise of a job opportunity, or something. But I’ll bet their poor families aren’t getting a cent sent home. I’ll bet Capitol is drugging them, too, to keep them under their control.” 

“She didn’t look high.” 

“Petunia didn’t seem high to me, either, but there’s no way she could possibly be enjoying what she’s doing over there. We’ve got to help her, and tomorrow, you’re coming with me.” 

************* 

In the cafeteria at lunchtime, Petunia again never saw Mary anywhere in the crowd of drugged, naked eaters. She sat at a table where a black woman and an Asian woman were whispering to each other. Petunia heard the name ‘Mary’ said a few times. Her heart jumped at the sound of the name, and she listened to them more carefully, straining against the drugs to focus her attention. 

“Do you buy…any of these stories…that some people escape?” the black woman asked in a thick African accent.  

“I wanna believe them,” the Asian said. “They give me hope.”  

“Maybe that’s…what they want, Arunny,” the black woman said. “They do it…so we don’t…kill ourselves…or something.” 

“Did you say…Mary…before?” Petunia asked them. 

“Do you know…what happened…to her?” Arunny asked.  

“Mary, the white girl…the redhead, right?” the black woman asked. 

“She had red hair,” Petunia said. “Yeah, Mary.” 

“Had red hair?” Arunny asked, jolting.  

“I think she was killed…last night,” Petunia said. “I hope I’m wrong…We tried to escape…When the Creeps came…and one crawled into me…as I was…losing consciousness…I saw her shaking…I think a…yellow Creep…burned her inside…to death.” 

“Don’t say that!” Arunny coughed, then covered her face so her tears wouldn’t be seen. She whispered. “Maybe you’re wrong…The drug…in the Creep…made you…see things.” 

“Maybe,” Petunia said. “I hope so.” 

“Mary was getting older,” the black woman said. “Her tits were sagging…I think they kill you…if you’re getting…unattractive…and you’re not…making as much…money for this place.” 

“Please don’t…talk like that, Kusiima,” Arunny said, fighting back tears. 

“Don’t worry, sweetie,” Kusiima said. “You’re still young…and pretty…as I am…and you are,” she said to Petunia. “We should be safe.” 

*************** 

That night, Petunia lay in bed, emotionally exhausted.  

I don’t care if the door by the head of my bed opens, she thought; I’m not going out there tonight. Kusiima reassured me that I’m safe from being killed, because I’m still young and pretty, which means I’m still useful to this whorehouse; but no one asked me for sex all day today. I never thought I’d hope to service more customers than fewer. Is Guy coming back? Is Thea? 

Then, lying on her back, she followed her train of thought as it went back to her ‘work relationship’ with Ricardo Davis, the man who lured her into Capitol. Drugged and drifting off into unconsciousness, she was ruminating her way into a dream… 

Business trip to New York City with Davis…meeting Ken Maynard about some impressive new technology…something microscopic…powerful…Davis wanted in on it…to be in charge of distribution, or marketing…a lot of money to be made in it…I’d get a big raise, too… 

We met Maynard in the hotel restaurant…I wore no underwear…I’d hoped Maynard would like me…with his money, give me a better job than what Davis had given me…I was glad I’d tarted myself up for Maynard…He was handsome and charming as well as rich…Too bad he was just as bad as Davis, as I’d learn eventually… 

At dinner, Maynard dropped his fork and went under the table to get it…He saw my spread legs…my pussy…he ate me out…Davis was French-kissing me and feeling my right tit…He never seemed to notice how long Maynard was under the table…didn’t care…I came in Maynard’s mouth… 

After our naughtiness, Ken came back up with his fork…He and Davis talked about the business…about the technology…“coated in a soft, rubbery covering”…”will look like multi-coloured larvae”…like baby worms…I didn’t understand what they were talking about…I wish I had… 

“We want to expand up into Canada”…”We have contacts in Mexico and Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia, even India”…”get our Commodities from there”…”shipped right to you”…”help us get more in Canada, as you have already done here, obviously”…I heard Ken say all this to Davis…I paid no mind to it…I just played footsies with Ken…”You’ll make a ton of money, Davis”… 

In our hotel room, I let Davis fuck my ass…then Ken knocked on our door to give Davis something…naked, I went over to let Ken see me…Davis took a sleeping pill…when he was asleep, I went over, still naked, to Ken’s room, next door…I let him fuck my ass, too…hoped he’d like me enough to marry me…I’m so stupid… 

I had no idea there were hidden cameras in his room…in Davis’s room, too…in the hotel hallways, where Ken had me walk about naked with him… 

And now I’m back in Canada…Ken gave me over to ‘Free Mark’…was I in an airport?…I was always drugged with Creeps…There was the airplane ride with Davis to New York City…then the flight back to Toronto…then back to New York to be with Ken…Then ‘Free Mark’ took me from Ken…Now I’m in Toronto again…because Guy and Thea were here…I don’t remember another flight back to Canada…Did Mark take me back?…he must have, in a private jet or something…I just remember that party…Davis…Ken Maynard…’Free Mark’…other men…fucking me…fucking Ken’s maid, Rosa… 

Now I’m in Ontario again…I must be… 

Rumination

[NOTE: please read the second and third paragraphs from this post before continuing. Important–don’t skip reading them!]

In many ways, we C-PTSD sufferers are our own worst enemies. I don’t mean that in a shaming way, of course, but rather in a compassionate way, and with the intention of motivating us to stop one bad habit of ours in particular: rumination.

We can be obsessive in going over our pain, again and again, with no end to the ruminating in sight. Why? What psychological purpose does it serve? What emotional need does it attempt to satisfy? It seems masochistic, for all we seem to be doing is feeling an endless replay of a tape loop of old pain.

Are we hoping to discover some new insight as to why things happened the way they did (with our abusers)? That’s how it seems to me, whenever I ruminate about the family that messed with my mind throughout my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood…right up to my (probably) narcissistic mother’s death.

The bad thoughts never seem to go away.

Here’s the thing: after our narcissistic abusers are gone, the mental abuse continues in our victimized heads; we do it to ourselves. We become our own psychological abusers, however much we may not want to.

I have a tendency of waking up after only three or four hours of sleep (needing to use the washroom); then, when I go back to bed,…all the bad thoughts come back into my head. My inner critic reminds me of many a social failure I’ve had, hurtful things the family said to me, whether in the recent or the remote past, or worse!…imagined cruel retorts to anything I might say to assert myself. After that has started, I can generally forget about getting the other four or five hours of sleep I need. Sound familiar?

So, how do we stop all this ruminating? One obvious thing we should do is mentally to say to ourselves, “Stop it!” as soon as we realize we’re doing it again. Even more obvious, though, is that this is easier said than done.

How do we stop the ruminating?

It might help to remind ourselves of why we need to stop. Keep your list of reasons short and sweet, so your mind doesn’t wander off into more nonsense. Here are mine:

  1. Rumination doesn’t help me at all.
  2. Rumination is an addiction. Kick the habit.
  3. I already know how I feel about my abusers. Why go over it again?
  4. I already know why I feel that way about them. Why analyze it again?
  5. I call them abusers for a reason.
  6. They have the problem, not me. (See #3, 4, and 5.)
  7. My faults are no reason to gaslight me. Abuse doesn’t improve people.

Another good thing to do is to use those good inner voices I wrote about in other posts, and imagine them saying loving things to you, to bring you out of the bad thoughts.

I imagine my new, internalized good objects saying such things as the following. Father: “It was all them that did the bad. None of it was you, son.” Mother: “You’re a beautiful, wonderful human being, and we love you. We’d never treat you so hurtfully. You need to forgive yourself for your faults. We won’t judge you so harshly.”

We need to give ourselves the caring we never got from our abusers.

As you can see, we all need to practice self-compassion: 1) speaking these words of kindness to ourselves; 2) remembering how everyone experiences these feelings of failure and suffering, in one form or another; and 3) being mindful of whenever we lapse back into bashing ourselves.

For all this to help you, you have to practice it regularly. Remember that the reason you doubt your justification to go no contact, to think well of yourself, and to recognize that your abusers really wronged you (i.e., you are not being over-sensitive) is because they’ve programmed you to think that way, to control you.

We call them abusers for a reason. We also call ourselves victims for a reason. It’s high time we put the feelings of victimization behind us.

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Seven

“We’re going to rescue you, Petunia,” Thea said as she kissed her naked friend on her lips and cheeks, always rocking her back and forth. “Guy will help me, then we’ll take you home with us.” 

“Thank you,” Petunia said, surprised that she could finally speak for herself in the white room. “I knew you’d never abandon me.” 

“No, we’d never do that,” Thea said, now kissing her way down Petunia’s neck to her chest. “But first, let me show you how much I love you, the way Guy did.” She put her face between Petunia’s legs. 

She closed her eyes and sighed at the sensation of Thea’s tongue sliding up her vagina. That tongue began wiggling in a familiar way.  

Then it felt as if severed from Thea’s mouth, and still wiggling inside Petunia’s vagina, and crawling deeper and deeper inside. 

Soon, it no longer felt as if it were there, but rather somewhere inside her intestines. It grew warmer…then hotter.  

Petunia opened her eyes. Thea was no longer there. She looked down at her chest, which was glowing, as if there were a fire inside. Indeed, her insides felt hotter…and hotter… 

There was a scraping sound by her ears. She opened her mouth to scream… 

Petunia was woken by the sound of a small, window-like square door, on the wall at the head of her cot, unlocking and sliding open. This night offered another opportunity to escape. There were three other such doors, on the wall on the other side of their room, that also opened, waking three other sex slaves. Still feeling the effects of the blue Creeps put in them to drug them to sleep, they all crawled into the holes, unsure if they were still dreaming or if this was reality. 

As Petunia crawled into her escape hole, she wasn’t sure if she was seeing metal walls or transparent ones made of flesh, outside of which seemed the endless waves of an ocean at night. The other ones escaping had the same feeling. Was it dream, or was it real? 

As with the last time, there was a shifting back and forth between the sense of crawling through tunnels made of steel and of transparent intestine flesh, a moving back and forth like waves, waves seen outside the ‘flesh’, then seeming to transform into steel, then back again. 

******************** 

As they were crawling through the intestine-like tunnels, Mark and Jim were watching in the Regulating Room, where they’d watched Petunia with Thea, with video screens monitoring every other room in the building, as well as computer tracking systems for the tunnels.  

“You sure their hopes won’t be so frustrated, after so many failed attempts, that they’ll stop trying to escape?” Jim asked. 

“I’m positive,” Mark said. “The blue Creeps, apart from putting them to sleep, put them in a semi-awake, semi-dreaming state that makes each escape attempt seem new, as if it’s happening for the first time. On top of that, our fake announcements of successful escapes, like last time, when we killed Frank Bender and claimed he got out, will keep their hopes alive.” 

“I don’t even get the need to give them hope,” Jim said. 

“If they despair, it’ll affect their physical health,” Mark explained. “We’ve had Commodities who’ve actually died of hopelessness. Ever since we came up the Escape Hope Initiative, we’ve never had a death from despair.” 

“I see.” 

“Hope of escape. Hope of freedom. Hope of upward mobility. We teach that idea to people all the time, though ever so few ever rise out of the lower classes. I’m one of the few exceptions, hence everyone calls me ‘Free’ Mark.” 

“You think I’ll ever rise that high one day?” 

“It isn’t impossible, Jim. As hard as it is, never believe it’s impossible. Just work as hard as you can, and you can get there with me.” 

******************** 

Petunia kept crawling and crawling through the labyrinthine tunnels, as did the other three. It was so dark and claustrophobic: they could get around only by feel, and with the dim help of the little dot-like lights that appeared every so often in the tunnels. Her tense panting was a rhythm that went against the frantic thumping of her hands and knees on the metal floors and walls she was feeling her way through. 

Keep going, keep going, she thought, her head swimming from the effects of the drug; Am I crawling through tunnels, or am I swimming in the sea? Am I dreaming? I’m not sure. If this is real, I might die, as Frank did…I think. I might get drugged and taken back. I might escape. But if I never take these chances, I’ll only remain a sex slave, for the rest of my life. I must keep my hope alive. Was that Thea with me earlier today, or was that a dream, a wish-fulfillment? I can barely tell fantasy from reality anymore, it seems. 

The other three, two women and a man, thought the same things to motivate themselves. One of the women thought, I’ve done this before, I think—crawled through tunnels, or swam in the sea at night, to try to get out…or was it a dream I had? Am I dreaming the same thing again? I can’t tell. But if it’s real, I must try to get out. Did the other woman I tried to escape with die in here? I can’t remember. Everything feels like such a fog in my mind. Still, I must try. 

That woman reached a passageway that Petunia would come to right after her, so Petunia was then crawling right behind her. 

Soon, the two women saw a glow up ahead, along a passage that intersected with theirs. There was also the faint noise of the other two crawling along that way, with other, as yet indistinct, noises. The other two seemed to be yelping with fear. 

“What’s that ahead?” Petunia asked in a slurry voice, beginning to find the sounds familiar, but in a bad way. 

“It’s a way out, if we’re lucky,” the woman in front slurred. “Let’s hurry. I can’t stand…being here anymore.” 

Then, the squeaking noises came. 

The squeaks of what seemed like millions of Creeps crawling after all four of them, squeaking, screeching noises like those of the string section of an orchestra playing a composition by Penderecki.  

Petunia looked behind her and saw a glowing colony of Creeps coming after her and the woman in front of her. The glow was a clutter of blues and yellows. A shot of adrenaline throughout her body made her heart pound. She shrieked, then scrambled ahead. 

“Hurry!” Petunia said as loudly as she could with her weak, drugged voice, and tapping the woman’s feet. “They’re coming.” 

The woman in front looked back. “Oh, no!” Now she felt the adrenaline rush. 

As before, the adrenaline woke them up to see only metal tunnel walls now…no waves undulating outside transparent plastic walls. 

Both of them were scurrying as fast as they could, hoping to see a way outside soon, as faint as such a hope was. The glowing from the intersection ahead made the woman in front more visible to Petunia, and then she looked back again past Petunia to see the Creeps gaining on them. Petunia recognized her as one of the people she’d chatted with several days before, with Sam and Wendy, the woman who’d asked if the Creeps’ colours had any meaning. 

“What’s your name?” Petunia asked. 

“Mary,” she said. “Why?” 

“If we die here, I wanna know…who I’m dying with.” 

“And your name?” 

“Petunia.” 

“Pleased to have…my ass…in your face, instead of…my ass in…some creep’s, eating me out.” 

Speaking of Creeps eating them out… 

Petunia screamed as she felt several crawl up her right leg, tickling the sole of her foot and her calf. She squeezed her legs and her buttocks together, as tight as she could, desperate to keep those things from crawling up her vagina or rectum. 

Those Creeps were just too fast, though. 

One of them slipped up her asshole. 

Her panic made the effect of the original drug wear off faster. She was shaking all over, her head and limbs banging against the metal sides of the tunnel. She felt the Creep tickling deeper inside her rectum, flickering against her rectal, then intestinal walls. She was slipping on her own sweat, which was soaking her as if she’d been out in a heavy rain without an umbrella. 

Her panic was so intense, she didn’t even notice Mary kicking her in the head and shoulders, for she now had a Creep crawling up her vagina, making her reaction as violent and spastic as Petunia’s. 

Further off, both of them could hear the faint screams of the other two, the man with a Creep dancing its way deeper in his ass and approaching his large intestine, and the woman with a Creep twisting its way up her vagina. Their screams soon died down, though…had blue Creeps gone inside them? Petunia hoped so. Were they feeling the soporific effects of blue Creeps? Their banging against the walls of the tunnels soon stopped, and they collapsed. Petunia hoped they would survive, but she had no way of knowing. Would she recognize their faces in the cafeteria? She hadn’t seen them up close in the tunnels. 

Petunia was lucky enough to get a blue Creep. She felt herself getting drowsy, as if high on a downer. Her vision got blurry, and she barely noticed Mary looking back at her, no longer in terror, but with her face all tensed up, as if she were in agony. No longer was Mary kicking and punching the walls: now, she was just trembling—was she acquiescing to fate? 

********************** 

The next morning in the cafeteria, Petunia looked all over the place for Mary. She tried to focus as well as she could, as against the numbing effects of the green Creeps she’d been given to keep her docile and in control. Her blurry, wavy vision forced her to strain her eyes to see if Mary’s face was anywhere to be seen among the two dozen others in the cafeteria. She looked and looked. 

Maybe what I saw last night, she thought as she searched for Mary, of her dying, was just a dream. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t real. 

“Mary,” she murmured, as if drunk. “Mary, Mary…”

Analysis of ‘The Dead Zone’

The Dead Zone is a supernatural thriller novel by Stephen King that was published in 1979. It’s about a man, Johnny Smith, who has psychic powers of precognition and clairvoyance, which give him visions of the past or future of whomever he touches.

David Cronenberg directed a film adaptation, with Christopher Walken as Smith, in 1983. A TV series with Anthony Michael Hall as Smith was produced in the 2000s. I’ll be referencing the novel and Cronenberg’s film.

Here are some quotes, from the novel:

“But the people didn’t elect buffoons to Washington. Well—hardly ever.” (p. 199)

“Did I grow a third eye?” –Johnny, p. 98

“Nothing is ever lost, Sarah. Nothing that can’t be found.” (p. 402)

“It’s been my experience that ninety-five percent of the people who walk the earth are simply inert, Johnny. One percent are saints, and one percent are assholes. The other three percent are the people who do what they say they can do.” –Roger Chatsworth, p. 285

“PRECOGNITION, TELEPATHY, BULLSHIT! EAT MY DONG, YOU EXTRASENSORY TURKEY!” –hate letter to Johnny, p. 181

“Well, we all do what we can, and it has to be good enough…and if it isn’t good enough, it has to do.” –Johnny’s letter to Sarah, p. 401

“…some things are better lost than found.” –Dr. Sam Weizak, to Johnny, p. 223

From the film:

‘”Bless me”? Do you know what God did for me? He threw an 18-wheeled truck at me and bounced me into nowhere for five years! When I woke up, my girl was gone, my job was gone, my legs are just about useless… Blessed me? God’s been a real sport to me!’ –Johnny Smith

“I need your support, I need your expertise, I need your input, and most importantly, I need your money.” [laughter] –Greg Stillson

“I have had a vision that I am going to be President of the United States someday. And nobody, and I mean nobody is going to stop me!” –Stillson

“Let’s send Greg Stillson to the United States Senate – and mediocrity to hell!” –Stillson […]

Johnny Smith: I’ve been tutoring this boy named Stuart. In the vision, I saw him drown. But that’s not the point. In the vision, something was missing.

Dr. Sam Weizak: How – how do you mean?

Johnny Smith: It was like… a blank spot, a dead zone.

Dr. Sam Weizak: First of all, tell me, did the boy, in fact, drown?

Johnny Smith: His father wanted him to play hockey. I talked him out of it. The boy’s alive.

Dr. Sam Weizak: Ah. Yes. Don’t you see how clear it is? Not only can you see the future, you can…

Johnny Smith: I can change it.

Dr. Sam Weizak: You can change it, exactly. Here. Yes, John. That is your… your “dead zone.” The possibility of… of altering the outcome of your premonitions. It’s fascinating. Let me make a note. […]

Johnny Smith: [touching the mother of serial killer Frank Dodd] You knew? Didn’t you?

Henrietta Dodd: You… you’re a devil, sent from Hell!

In spite of his special powers of knowing what most people couldn’t know, Johnny also has a limit to that unique knowledge, a realm of unknowing that he calls the dead zone: ‘The tumor lies in that area which I always called “the dead zone.”‘ (p. 396) This leads us to a central theme in the novel, a dialectical understanding of the relationship between knowing and unknowing. The biting head of the ouroboros (where dialectical opposites meet) of extrasensory knowledge leads to the bitten tail of unknowing.

Connected to this yin-and-yang concept of knowledge and ignorance is the relationship between organized religion–an authoritarian establishment often associated with superstition and fundamentalist bigotry towards any other forms of knowledge contradictory to its dogma–and intuitive mysticism and spirituality. Johnny’s mother, Vera, adheres to the former; Greg Stillson peddles the former as a Bible salesman in the 1950s; and Johnny demonstrates the latter with his psychic powers.

In this connection, consider what the Tao Te Ching says: “To realize that our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental sickness.” (71) Also, “He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.” (56) Vera’s overconfidence in the ‘truth’ of her Christian fundamentalism, with her attendant neuroticism, demonstrates how she thinks she knows the truth, but doesn’t. Johnny’s admitted “dead zone” of unknowing, along with his unassuming nature, evading the spotlight, shows how he knows, because he doesn’t know.

Added to this virtue is Johnny’s loving, empathic nature. Those who insist on fundamentalist interpretations of Biblical prophecy, obsessing over how Scripture supposedly warns us of 20th and 21st century evils, things its writers couldn’t possibly have known, ought to recall what Paul wrote to the Corinthian church: “…though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” (1 Corinthians 13:2)

Johnny has oceans of this love: he has it for his father, his mother (as irritating as her fundamentalism may be), and for his girl, Sarah, whom he would have married, if not for his car accident and four-and-a-half-year coma, a kind of extended stay in the belly of the great fish, making Jonah‘s sojourn a mere pit-stop in comparison.

In relation to the rest of the events of the story (and to Jonah’s, and to Jesus’ death and resurrection, to which Johnny’s coma is symbolically associated), the timing of Johnny’s coma is unusual. The coma occurs towards the beginning of the novel/film, before his hesitancy to use his abilities for the good of the world; whereas Jonah’s wish to escape having to obey God’s command preceded his time in the belly of the great fish. The same goes for Jesus’ harrowing of Hell, between his death and resurrection: this harrowing occurs towards the end of the four Gospels, after his temptation by the devil in the wilderness, and after his spiritual struggle in Gethsemane, as we know.

Johnny’s name is a pun on Jonah; it also shares a J with Jesus (Yeshua being a variant of Joshua). Johnny is a teacher, with a good heart, like Jesus (who was often called ‘rabbi’), and also like carpenter Jesus, he’s a man of modest means. Contrast Johnny with Trump-like, narcissistic Stillson, whose ambition is to become the US president one day, and to prove his daddy wrong, that he’s better than Daddy claimed he is (‘…his father was…bellowing, “You’re no good, runt! You’re no fucking good!”‘p. 9).

Heinz Kohut wrote of how the narcissistic personality grows from a lack of parental empathy, and this is clearly what Stillson lacked in childhood. Johnny, in contrast, has deeply loving parents, instilling a self-love in him that cultivates humility. Just as there’s a dialectical relationship between knowing and unknowing, so is there such a relationship between humility/self-love and narcissism/self-hate.

As it is within, so is it without: Johnny gives out love as best he can to the world, even when cruel, bad luck takes away his job and the love of his life (ironically and dialectically, right after his amazingly good luck on the Wheel of Fortune); Stillson, on the other hand, abuses a dog (when selling Bibles!–pp. 5-7), and bullies those around him to make them comply with his ambitions (e.g., Chapter 18). Even in the alternate future Johnny prevents, with Stillson achieving his presidential ambition, he chooses nuclear genocide over diplomacy with the Soviets. Johnny projects and introjects good, Stillson, evil, regardless of good or ill fortune.

In the end, though Johnny dies, his spirit is felt by Sarah: his Christ-like spiritual body (i.e., his hand–p. 401) touches her. In the novel, we don’t read of Stillson’s suicide, as we see it in the film; he is, however, spiritually destroyed by the scandal caused by his using a child as a human shield against Johnny’s rifle. In the end, Greg is still just the son of his contemptuous father. Johnny, however, is more of a son of God, not just through his abilities, but also through his selfless sacrifice for humanity.

Indeed, in many ways, Johnny’s life can be paralleled with Christ’s, though the order of events seem scrambled, reversed, or even of a contrary nature when compared to the narrative of the Gospels. As I’ve stated above, Johnny’s ‘death-and-resurrection’ coma occurs towards the beginning, rather than at the end, of the story. His final act of sacrifice to save humanity involves trying to kill a malefactor (Stillson) rather than save one, as Jesus does when he says, “To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” (Luke 23:43)

When Johnny is shot, a bullet hits him in the hand (in the movie), suggesting the stigmata. According to the novel, the last bullet to hit him goes “into the left side of his midsection” (p. 384), comparable to the spear stuck in Christ’s side (John 19:34), the last piercing of his skin. Stillson’s use of the child as a human shield suggests the self-centredness of the other crucified malefactor: “If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.” (Luke 23:39)

Sarah’s relationship with Johnny, still a love relationship after she married Walt Hazlett during Johnny’s coma, is an illicit one, since she commits adultery by sleeping with Johnny. Her adultery invites comparison with Mary Magdalene, who visited Christ’s tomb when he, risen from the dead, spoke her name (John 20:16). The comparison is clearer when Sarah feels the hand of Johnny’s spirit on her neck (p. 401)

So Johnny is the Jesus of anti-authoritarianism, symbolically in his ‘death-resurrection’ coma happening at the beginning of the story, rather than at the end, as in the Gospels; in his salvific assassination attempt on Stillson; in the superiority of Johnny’s psychic powers to the dogma of Christian fundamentalism.

“He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” (1 John 4:8) Johnny may have a dead zone, but he still has more in him than mortal knowledge, for he is full of love for humanity.

And even Vera’s unknowing has its limits, for she is right that Johnny should use his divine gift to help humanity. He is reluctant to at first, and in this way his struggle parallels Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, or Jonah’s attempted flight from God.

But Johnny eventually relents, helping the police catch a serial killer/rapist, who as it turns out is a cop himself, Frank Dodd! Here again, we see the anti-authoritarian Jesus in Johnny, exposing a killer among the authorities, the cops–something that upsets Sheriff Bannerman, who has held Dodd in high regard up to this point. This anti-authority Johnny is in this respect like anti-authoritarian Jesus, who exposed the moral hypocrisy of the Pharisees, the legal and religious authorities of his time. (Matthew 23)

Dodd, as a serial killer/rapist, is of the Norman Bates/Ed Gein variety: he lives at home with his mother, Henrietta, from whom he’s received his pathologies, in particular, the notion of “those cheap slutty women that’d be happy to give a nice boy like my Frank an incurable disease” (p. 252). Henrietta is so obsessed with ‘protecting’ her son from “those cheap slutty women” that she “put a clothespin on it so [little Frank would] know how it felt…when you got a disease. A disease from one of those nasty-fuckers, they’re all nasty-fuckers, and they have to be stopped…” (p. 240)

The attitude that Dodd got from his mother, that ‘all women are whores,’ while his mother is apparently the only feminine angel (she who pierced his dick with a clothespin when he was a child!), is an example of psychological splitting, a common defence mechanism, but one here that is taken to a pathological level.

Thus we see in Dodd, as we see in Stillson, a common origin of authoritarian thinking: toxic parenting (consider Philip Larkin‘s famous poem in this regard). The Biblical injunction to “honour thy father and thy mother” is transferred, by the victims of toxic parents, onto a similarly pathological honouring of authority figures–police, politicians, and religious leaders, even to the point of revering scriptural conceptions of divinity.

Now, Johnny has quite a flawed mother, one whose religious excesses he even compares to Henrietta’s pathologies: “there was something in her eyes, narrowed to glittering slits in their puffy sockets, that reminded him unpleasantly of the way his mother’s eyes had sometimes looked when Vera Smith was transported into one of her religious frenzies.” (p. 251)

But Vera’s faults don’t cause Johnny to split his internal and external worlds into narcissistic idealizing and devaluing, as Stillson’s and Dodd’s parents do. Johnny’s psychic gift symbolizes his empathy, for it connects and unifies him with the external world, rather than alienates him from it. His precognition and clairvoyance also link the past, present, and future for him. Finally, the paradox of his knowing and unknowing, his psychic authority (coupled with his spiritual anti-authoritarianism), the living death of his coma, and his saving of the world by trying to murder Stillson, all show how his actions unify opposites.

Thus, Johnny symbolizes the ideal that I call The Three Unities, those of Space, Time, and Action, a spirituality free of the authoritarianism of organized religion. This dialectical monism is similar to Wilfred Bion‘s concept of O, an ineffable, inscrutable notion of Ultimate Reality that is attained only through an “abandonment of memory, desire, understanding, sense impressions — and perhaps also the abandonment of ego itself.” (Grotstein) This abandonment of understanding almost sounds like a giving-up of knowledge…the dead zone for accessing divine knowledge? Attaining knowing through a cloud of unknowing? How dialectical!

To return to the Christian symbolism of the story, I find it interesting to compare Johnny’s suffering with Jesus’ passion. As I’ve stated above, Johnny’s coma is a symbolic death and resurrection. Jesus’ physical suffering–his scourging, the crown of thorns, the nails through his hands and feet, and the torture of slowly dying on a cross (hence the term excruciating)–is the temporal opposite of Johnny’s psychological suffering–losing Sarah, losing four and a half years of his life, losing his teaching job, and losing his ability to walk normally–which comes after his coma.

This reversal of events symbolizes how Johnny’s a kind of ‘anti-Jesus,’ if you will (not an antichrist, of course!), in that his miraculous acts, his self-sacrifice, and his love of humanity don’t result in a new religion exploiting his memory to establish yet another authoritarian institution. His dead zone, emphasized in the story to the point of being its title, shows how important it is to stress the limitations of one’s talents and knowledge, which is the true basis of humility.

If we pretend we don’t have those limitations, we become like the “slick” Dodd (p, 240), or “The Laughing Tiger” Stillson (p. 293), men whose overweening pride collapses into shame, as when Dodd confesses (p. 255) and kills himself, and in the aftermath of Stillson’s use of a child as a human shield. Tragic irony for the hubristic.

(By the way, another bit of paradoxical irony is seen in how narcissistic Stillson is compared to Trump, and in many ways correctly so, of course: yet, where Stillson as president endangers humanity by wanting to start nuclear war with Russia, Trump’s relative reluctance to show hostility to Russia is what makes the political establishment dislike him. As I’ve argued elsewhere, though, our reasons for disliking him should be the same reasons for disliking that political establishment: they’re all authoritarian narcissists, and they’re all dangerous…but hey! What do I know?)

Stephen King, The Dead Zone, Signet Books, New York, 1979

Lao Tzu, Tao Teh Ching, Shambhala, New York, 1961

‘Creeps,’ an Erotic Horror Novel, Chapter Six

Thea went into Capitol and found Petunia’s picture on their computers. In five minutes, she was in a room with her naked friend. Since she rightly suspected they were being watched and listened to, Thea had to pretend she was a lesbian. 

She got on the bed with Petunia and held her close. 

“I’m sorry, Petunia, but I have to pretend,” she whispered, lightly kissing Petunia on the cheek. “Why are you here?” 

“What do you want me to do to please you?” Petunia asked in a voice that sounded so fake, Thea couldn’t believe Guy thought it was genuine. Help me, Thea, Petunia thought; please get me out of here. 

Men, Thea thought as she rocked Petunia back and forth in her arms; they have no empathy, no ability to distinguish fake emotion from real. I’m so disappointed in Guy: he only heard what he wanted to hear from Petunia. He’s no better than Dad was when he was fucking whores behind Mom’s back. 

“I want to free you from here,” Thea whispered, between kisses, in Petunia’s ear. “How did you get mixed up in all this?” 

“Do you want to lick my pussy, or shall I lick yours?” Petunia said with a fake smile when she looked into Thea’s eyes, then she thought, I must get you to understand, Thea: help me. Please, feel the message I write on your arm. 

“Are you on drugs? Is that why you’re saying that?” Thea whispered into Petunia’s ear. 

Petunia put her finger on Thea’s arm, moving it in a line. 

“You don’t seem high,” Thea whispered, noting what felt like an H written on her arm. They’re using some kind of mind control on her. They must be, she thought. Now she felt an E. 

Petunia was shaking all over, for this writing was being done with the greatest effort. She managed to keep that finger steady, though, and wrote an L on Thea’s arm. 

“H…E…L…” Thea whispered in Petunia’s ear, careful to be as inaudible as possible, for fear of any hidden microphones in the room. “Help?” 

Petunia wrote a P, then a U…then an S. 

“Help us?” Thea whispered. “Of course.” She’s not the only victim, she thought. “Of course we’ll figure out a way to free you all.” Capitol has a whole legion of sex slaves here, all mind-controlled in some way, as Petunia is, she thought; Guy and I can’t limit our mission to saving only her. We have to save them all. But how? They legalized prostitution, as long as it’s ‘consensual,’ and with the way Petunia’s acting, under some form of mind control, Capitol will be able to trick anyone we get to investigate into thinking she is consenting to all this. 

Thea held Petunia close, still rocking her back and forth as she felt that finger write H-E-L-P-U-S over and over again. 

She seems to have a little bit of bodily control, Thea thought; I wonder if we can get her to write those letters on the hand of a government official investigating this prostitution operation. 

Always worried about microphones, Thea used her finger to write W-E-W-I-L-L-H-E-L-P-Y-O-U on Petunia’s back, over and over again, to reassure her. 

“OK, I think we can stop here,” Thea said aloud after being with Petunia for about fifty minutes. 

“But you have ten more minutes,” Petunia said. Please don’t leave me, Thea, she thought; I wish you could hold me like this forever. 

She needs me, Thea thought; I’d better stay here till the end. “You’re right. I want my money’s worth,” she said for the microphones to pick up. 

The ten minutes went by, the whole time Thea holding her tight, rocking her back and forth, and writing W-E-W-I-L-L-H-E-L-P-Y-O-U on her back.  

Finally, her hour was up. 

“OK, sweetie, I have to go now,” Thea said, getting off the bed with Petunia and caressing her cheek. “I’ll be back. I promise.” She smiled at her, then walked towards the door. 

******************** 

“That’s odd,” a man watching video of the room said. “All she wanted to do was cuddle with Petunia Walker? No sex? Almost the whole time, she didn’t talk to Petunia, except near the end. She doesn’t even seem like the kind of person who’d come here. She seems too straight to want to come here.” 

“You’re right,” another man watching said. “I’ll bet she’s one of those anti-prostitution protesters checking up on our operation.” 

“What should we do, Mark?” the first man asked. 

“Same as always, Jim,” Mark said. “Remember her, and keep an eye on any woman looking like her coming back here.” 

“OK, Boss.” 

“She’ll never be able to prove anything. She’ll try, as so many others have, then fail.”