The Never List

following me with their eyes as I passed meekly by. I looked around at the carefully constructed scenes of torment that filled the space: machines, contraptions of agony were in use everywhere, with elaborate ropes and pulleys, chains and spikes, nodes and wires.
    I realized I hadn’t taken a breath since walking through the door.
    Across from what I could only imagine were medieval torture instruments, a row of booths with tables lined one side of the bar. Adele led me over to an empty one, weaving her way through a sea of dark bodies. As we walked deeper into the club, my senses were taken over by the stale smell of the place: the odor of sweat, lubricants, and indeterminate bodily fluids mingled to overpower the underlying scent of commercial-grade disinfectant. My stomach turned, as I imagined microscopic particles of these elements penetrating my body through my nose and mouth and skin.
    When we finally reached a table, a decade later it seemed, I started to ease onto the bench across from her, but Adele motioned for me to sit next to her instead. I assumed this was part of the ritual here between master and slave, and I followed it almost mindlessly, slipping into that role with a disturbing sense of familiarity.
    I looked at Adele hard. She still had not explained what made someone gravitate toward this particular form of perversity, whether as role player or scholar. Was studying this world as much a twisted fetish as being a part of it? Was it just a form of voyeurism that happened to have the stolid edifice of a university to supportit? Or was she, as she claimed, merely trying to understand the near miss of her youth, to plumb to some strange depths to overcome the fear of how close she had come to personal destruction?
    “Well? How are you doing?” she said, looking at me curiously.
    “Just fine,” I managed to mutter, and I looked away, remembering that in real life it wasn’t polite to stare like that.
    Then I saw a couple approaching us. The man was tall, with a long mustache and beard, and a perfectly bald head, glistening with sweat. In his hand he carried a black leather leash, at the end of which was a thin woman, clad entirely in black leather from head to toe. Only her eyes peered out at us from a slit in her tight-fitted hood. Her mouth was covered by a flap that was zipped closed. She was stooped, shuffling along with irregular footsteps, almost as though she were injured. I squinted in the darkness, trying to determine if there was, in fact, something physically wrong with her.
    The man waved pleasantly to Adele. She greeted him equally cheerily, “Hi, Piker.”
    They hugged, and I could have sworn I saw an air kiss. It was hard for me to accept this benighted place as a locus of some kind of community, even a deviant one.
    Adele leaned over and whispered to me, “Perfect.”
    “Have a seat,” she said to him.
    He ambled over to the other bench and slid in. The woman waited silently for his command. He ignored her and sat down, leaving her standing there at attention. Adele didn’t blink.
    He turned calmly to us.
    “Who do we have here?” He looked only at Adele, never making eye contact with me. I figured that unless she identified me as someone worthy of speaking to, he would treat me like an object.
    “This is … Blue, for tonight, anyway.” She smiled. “She’s doing some research on Jack Derber.”
    A look of scorn crossed the man’s face. “Oh, him.” He turned to me then, meeting my eyes for the first time, as he realized I wasn’t Adele’s slave after all. “I hope you’re covering how he set our movement back twenty years. That bastard.”
    “Movement?”
    “BDSM. When that story broke, everyone assumed that he was a BDSM practitioner. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I mean, he had been, but we kicked his ass out of here years before he had those girls. I hope you get the truth out there about him. He was not like the rest of us. He never obeyed any rules.”
    “What kind of rules?”
    “Well, for starters, he didn’t respect safe words. Just blew past them. None of this”—he waved his arms in a sweeping gesture of pride—“works without safe words. That’s what it is all about. This is about love and intimacy too, you know. He never understood the importance of trust. That’s the only way to achieve TPE.”
    Adele turned to me. “Total Power Exchange,” she explained, rather inadequately, I thought. “You are in luck, tonight,” she