Works/Induction

Judith knew. She always had, maybe, but it was one of those things where you don't stop to know that you know. Not until adulthood, when the whirl of sensory overload has slowed. Judith was good with people because she knew. Judith did what she did because she knew.

She dealt with the people. Some irate, some looking for attention, some looking for money, some pleased, some wanting to be pleased, some disappointed, all of them desiring. She would look up from her desk as they crossed her doorway and know. He is just trying to scam us. She is interested, but also worried. He is very unhappy with us.

She couldn't quite get thoughts, never anything that specific, just feelings. Impressions. Her boss, who was The Boss, called it intuition and never overruled her character judgments.

Her husband, too, never questioned that she knew his bad days and good days so well. He assumed she had learned his habits, and she had, in several ways. Judith kept him happy, and found that she was one of those people for whom keeping someone else happy is enough to ensure their own happiness.

It never surprised her that her job was amorphous. A small company; these things happen. She interviewed new personnel and handled the tricky customer complaints and vetted new business partners with equal facility. Her job, to her, was always to know, and it didn't matter what label was attached.

The company grew and its politics grew too. When a company reaches two hundred people it hits some sort of critical mass; it is then large enough to have factions. One person is not a faction until he has followers. You have to have the body count in order to have a war.

One morning Judith was at her desk, reviewing the faces yet to come in her daybook, when one of the salesmen entered in a white heat. A friend, of sorts. It wouldn't have taken Judith to know he was enraged.

A co-worker. A competitor. Sneaking undercutting sales tactics. Not only was the other gent hurting the company's reputation with his tricks, he was making all the other salesmen look bad. Judith wasn't listening exactly. She was feeling the story. Like a sunlamp, like lying on the beach, the waves of the heat - but no, it wasn't quite heat. Sensation. Feeling his rage washing across her skin.

She goaded him. Told him things he wasn't entitled to know, things about rewards and promotions, things she knew would fan the fire. She felt his rage stoke up and warm her. Absorbing it, she sighed. Startled herself with the slight noise.

He misheard the sigh. "Well, thank you for telling me all that," he replied, calmer. "I realize there's nothing you can do about it, but I'm just glad to have been able to let it out, y'know?" He crept out.

Oh, God, what had she just done?

Judith stared without focusing at her daybook. Would he make trouble? Would he go jump out a window? She let things spin for a moment, staring, then jumped up from her desk and ran into the hall to find him.

She could feel him through his closed office door, but it didn't feel like rage or despair, and it didn't feel like he hated her. She didn't want to knock, didn't want to make it worse. She closed her eyes and made herself return to her desk, where her daybook and its names waited.

The next day, she hovered by his door again. She knew he was in there, scheming, working at who knew what. She could feel his purpose without actually discovering it. She nearly knocked. Nearly had her hand to the door. Just at that moment someone else - some anonymous angry fit - stormed down the hall behind her and she nearly buckled at the knees as he swept past, the way a gospel woman might swoon from the sheer rapture of Holy Spirit. She collected herself. Whoever it was was gone, past the next corner, out of sight.

Judith followed his anger like a scent trail. Tracking it across one hall and down another, too intent to see how eager she was. In an intersection she realized, and froze, stunned at her own activity.

She felt for a moment like she needed to lean against something, but nothing in the hallway looked strong enough. She wandered down the hall. As all aimless workers do, she ended up in the kitchen, the everlasting coffee pot filling the air with its scalded volcanic smell. Three or four workers sat, chatting over an early lunch eaten from plastic containers - the remains of casseroles and meatloafs and pastas. She didn't know them, but she knew. She knew more than she ever had.

One was angry about her husband. It felt to Judith like she suspected he was cheating on her. Another was thinking about the amazing night she had spent, sexual acts Judith couldn't pick up specifically but which were causing the woman pleased embarrassment, along with fear that her new lover would turn out to be a jerk or worse. A third was trying desperately to decide how to conceal something she had done, some office incompetence perhaps. None of them were talking about any of this aloud. None of them were paying much attention to their food or each other.

Judith ran.

Every office she passed, every door, she felt something emanating from it. She knew too much. She thought that if she stood still even for a moment, she might go hungry again, feel that pang she had felt outside the salesman's door, the withdrawal. She wasn't supposed to need. Not like this.

She reached her office, looking like a fugitive, and slammed her door.

Three or four days, a week, a fortnight passed - however long it was until the point when the concealer could no longer mask the dark circles under Judith's eyes. One bad night, she had dreamed a woman crying, wailing her despair somewhere in darkness where she couldn't see. The next morning, Judith encountered her upstairs neighbor, whose husband of twenty years had abandoned her. The neighbor said she had cried all night long.

It was no longer enough to keep her husband happy. She had begun to get impatient with his desires, with his noctural wispy thoughts of women in bright red lipstick with their mouths caressing his cock. One night she teased him for over an hour, keeping him always on the brink, wiggling the tip of her tongue a little against the head of his penis, enjoying the feel of his nerves as he tensed up once again. Sucking in his ecstasy, he promptly forgot it and started over. She'd have gone all night, but his sensations finally were too intense for her to keep track of what she was doing. He fell asleep, and she went to gargle and brush her teeth. Looking in the bathroom mirror, she hated herself again, and hated him too.

In the office, Judith was scared to have a conversation. Each time she passed someone in strong emotion - elation or anger or jealousy or fear - she felt the pull to soak it up, to pick that person up and wring him out like laundry, leaving a puddle of emotion on the floor which she would get on all fours and lap up like a dog. She saw herself this way and shuddered.

She knew it had to stop.

Judith took all of her accumulated vacation time and began to explore the possibilities. She meditated. She chanted. She tried to distract her body with strenuous exercise. She played loud music in headphones at all hours. She tried drugs she could obtain legally, and later, ones she couldn't. She had one doctor whom she had convinced she was clinically depressed, another who believed she was schizophrenic, and another who hadn't reached a diagnosis yet but wasn't prepared to rule out a physical condidion. She knew they were all wrong, but she only courted them for their prescription pads.

Nothing worked. Judith's vacation ended and she went on unpaid leave. As her time and money vanished, she tried more desperate solutions. She went to a Voodoo priestess and also to a Wiccan circle. She prayed in any church she could find - although she tried to avoid them whenever the congregation was present; too many sins being repented.

Eventually she found a man, through a friend of a friend. A man with impeccable medical credentials, perhaps the leading specialist in his field, he would not do what Judith asked for any amount of money. But Judith knew his fantasies.

He strapped her to a table when their games were done, strapped her down and applied electrodes to her head and induced a strong current in a very precise location in her brain. Her whole body went rigid, relaxed, and then it was over.

She saw him peering down at her, couldn't tell whether he was worried or intrigued or pleased, and realized she had succeeded.

Judith went back to work two days later. She was warmly welcomed back by her co-workers, especially The Boss who had been at his wit's end without her. She was fired the next week. Her husband left, taking only a suitcase and his car, less than a month afterward.

It wasn't the same, they said. She didn't know anymore. She didn't have whatever it was that had made her what she was. She wasn't the person they wanted.

Judith sat in her empty house, at her kitchen table, considering her future and what she'd lost. What she'd gained.

She sat for a long time, feet together, arms folded on the tabletop, staring into space. She should react, she knew. Burst into tears or scream until she had no breath, or smash something, or at least leap onto the bed and flail with her arms and feet until exhausted. She knew she should feel. But she felt nothing.

Nothing at all.

Copyright © January 2000. Do not distribute or reproduce.