Shooting in the Dark

director of the dream makes a cut here, as if one camera has finished its work and another one, placed at a different angle, is taking over. Only the second camera doesn’t show its subject clearly. There is a period of darkness before a hazy image appears. All I could be certain of is that there is movement.
    I was reminded of a western. The cowboys have captured a wild palomino mare. There are three lariat loops around her long golden neck and the men are surrounding the horse in a circle, each of them pulling tightly on the rope. She cannot go left or right, back or forth of her own volition. She can only go where the men lead her.
    Through the mist the forms emerge. What I thought was a pony is the blind woman. The ropes do not bind her; they are around her neck but they are the strings of a puppet-master. I tug at the black thread in my hand and as I do so the blind woman takes a step forward. Another tug and I watch her step on to the ice that covers her swimming pool. She walks forward and with each step the ice crackles and strains; I see the clefts and fissures rupturing the surface of the pool, and the whole is echoed again and again as her smooth features are broken and distorted with fear and recollection.
    As the ice breaks up the camera zooms in, pierces through to the black and suffocating depths.
     
    Miriam didn’t stir for twenty minutes. I tried a variety of ways to make her react to stimulus during that time, but the Gallamine had her in its power. I was careful not to do anything that would be too painful as these drugs are not analgesic and there have been cases of myocardial damage. It was possible for me, even with a badly damaged thumb, to pick her up by her ankles and swing her back and forth like a trussed chicken. Her mouth was gaping, she was breathless and she was salivating copiously but did not appear frightened.
    As the effects of the drug wore off, Miriam seemed depressed. Her blood pressure was abnormally high and her heart was pumping so hard I could see it through her ribcage. She continued salivating and entered a period of acute nervous tension which went on for more than an hour. She insisted that she was all right but it was obvious that the Gallamine had provided a severe shock to her system.
    I shall use the other drug, Suxamethonium, on the blind woman. Suxamethonium has a quicker action and, like her sister, she will feel the effects within about fifteen seconds. As a preparation I have hidden it, together with a supply of syringes and a spare voice-activated recorder, in her garden, close to the swimming pool. Everything is ready. Except the weather.
     
    I’d been telling Miriam about risk society theory, how there is no big Other in our lives any more, like tradition or nature or religion. We no longer have a guide. Right and wrong have disappeared and what we are left with is an infinite number of choices.
    ‘What it was like in the old days,’ she said, ‘what I imagine is that there was something or someone watching over us.’
    ‘Like an angel?’
    ‘Could be,’ she said. ‘You could say that.’
    Miriam is not stupid. She is highly intelligent, just a little short on language.
    When I first met her she was already a Rule Girl. I’m a practising psychologist and I didn’t even know what that was. I do now, of course, and it is exactly what Miriam said it was. Rule Girls are heterosexual women who follow precise rules about how they will allow themselves to be seduced. They’ll go on a date, but only if they’re asked three days in advance. They won’t sleep with you on the first or second date. You get the idea? The rules correspond to customs that used to regulate the behaviour of previous generations. They emulate the prudish behaviour of old-fashioned women. These women feel the need to impose the rules because the customs that used to do the job are no longer functioning. Women like Miriam are not returning to conservative values; they are freely choosing their own rules. Or they believe they are. In the past there was no choice. Now there seems as though there might be one.
    It is the same with the master/slave relationship we have allowed to develop between us. Either of us can be master or slave, depending on the whim of the moment. It is as valid for Miriam to nail my penis to the workbench as it is for me to administer electric shocks to the tissue of her labia.
    To those of my colleagues who insist that this kind of behaviour is a direct