The Never List

better about going in there.”
    “It should. My point is that absolutely nothing will happen to you in that club without your consent. Nothing. No one will even touch you without your explicit permission. I’ve been coming here for years for my fieldwork, and no one has ever laid a hand on me.”
    I couldn’t help staring at her in her vinyl getup. I could understand why they left her alone. She looked pretty damn intimidating.
    “Okay, but if they kicked Jack out of there, why do I need to go in at all? What good will it do me?”
    “This is the one place where you can meet people who knew Jack. Really knew him. This is the only way to reach that layer the police never could. Members of this club have been coming here for many years. It’s the only one of its kind within a hundred miles; everyone in that circle comes through here eventually.”
    “I guess that’s what scares me—who are these people?” I said it with some disgust, but then stopped myself, wondering if Adele wasn’t really one of them after all. How long could you study these types, going in and out among them, dressing like them, immersing yourself in it, without participating in some way? I struggled for the right terminology before asking my next question: “What do they want out of this … lifestyle?”
    She leaned back against the car and sighed. “My doctoral thesis asked the same question— Paraphilia and Its Discontents . Look,” she began again, suddenly serious, “they want the same things as everyone else: community, connection, maybe a little thrill. Some people are wired differently, numb to the ordinary. Some are trying to make up for a lack of something, maybe fix something that’s broken. Others just have a different mode of self-expression.”
    I thought about that a second and decided to dare asking what I really wanted to know. “And for you, is this just something you study …?”
    She smiled wryly at first, but the smile faded almost as quickly as it came. She bit her lip—hard, it seemed to me—then pushed back a stray lock that had come loose, taking both hands to smooth it back into that tight bun, her fingers working like those of a magician, fast and familiar.
    “Come on, let’s go,” she said, ignoring my question. She stood up straight and nodded down toward the bag.
    I looked at it, then back at her, realizing the time had come to move forward. Steeling my resolve, I slowly opened it. I took out the clothes and started changing into them, crouching down low beside the car behind the open side door. A black leather vest with some very intricate laces. Vinyl pants with spikes running down the sides. She let me keep my own shoes, which were black slip-on Keds. I looked ridiculous, but Adele simply jerked her head in the direction of the club. No one would even notice me, she said. An appealing thought.
    The bouncer was a huge man with a shaved head and arms covered with fine spidery tattoos running all the way down to his wrists. He nodded at Adele. Clearly she came here enough to be recognized. He raised an eyebrow at me, shaking his head. I thought he seemed slightly amused, but he shrugged and let me follow Adele in. As I crossed the threshold, I closed my eyes, trying to beat back the terror inside me.
    Once in the building, my body felt enveloped in a mist of darkness and evil. This place was a vision of hell to me, all red and black, packed with a crowd geared out in studded leather who seemed, beyond any other terror, utterly unpredictable. The music was crushingly loud, and the air above the bar heavy with cigarette smoke. “Slaves” hung back behind their masters, heads down, cowering. I had to wonder if they were here voluntarily or if they were just brought out for play.
    Along the far wall was a T-shaped stage, and a girl in a full-body leather suit with a ball tied into her mouth was doing something I supposed had a distant relationship to dancing but seemed more like alternating poses of pain and ecstasy.
    I realized, from the way I was hunching my shoulders as I followedAdele, that I must have looked like her slave. For a moment my mind was catapulted back to the reality of that time when I was a slave. I started to feel dizzy—another sign of the panic attack I knew my body was harboring.
    The place was full, and to me at least, everyone else seemed like a regular in this underground world. They appeared to be moving in slow motion, their faces contorted with rage, some of them