This little tale has psychological overtones and is based on experiences of disassociation. It is also based on some scientific research I read, which cited caning as a radical treatment for mood disorders and depression because it releases endorphins that alter brain chemistry.
It begins with Mark narrating and then his partner Gary.
Originally published as part of the anthology ‘ The Corridor and Other Stories’
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The Corridor
Mark And The Spin Of Dreams
It was never going to be a good day. I knew so from the moment the radio alarm sang me from sleep to wakefulness. A remnant of its song bonded with my brain cells, fluttering like a pennant caught on a tree branch, refusing to blow away. It resonated an emotional call to arms I should have refused to heed: the road is long with many a winding turn.
The road is indeed long, but not winding, not in this case, and nor is it a road as such. I’m walking along a corridor, a corridor that lies as straight as a Roman road with no winding turns.
There are closed doors to the left of me. To the right of me there are long rows of windows. The glazed square units gaze out upon other glazed units. It’s like being in a significant dream. Freud and Picasso would have been interested in the cubist shades of this corridor with its analytical squares and rectangles of windows, floor and doors. Art and psychology architecturally combined. Was that the intention of the person who designed the hospital building? I doubt it. It was probably some kind of Freudian slip rather than anything conscious on the part of the architect, though who can tell? Who can ever know what thoughts and intentions are concealed within the minds of others?
Once, in a long moment of deluded reality, I was drawn down another corridor not dissimilar to this one. I was aiming for a light I could see at the other end, or thought I saw. I never reached it. The serpent corridor made a lateral move taking me through a door of conscience, which delivered me here, to the place I am now. It goes to prove I suppose that life is pretty much lived in a straight line with lateral detours through various doors.
Dreams are another matter. Dreams are cyclic, at least mine are. They spin me around and around until I want to scream - STOP the world, I want to get off. What I mean is that I want to escape the spin of dreams and feel a sensible solid floor beneath the soles of my feet. I envy people who instinctively know all the right doors to open and walk through and similarly to close again, and who never lose the comforting feel of solid ground beneath their feet.
I cannot sense the floor beneath my feet, not today. Today is a day of sensory deficit. From the moment I swung my legs out of bed this morning the ground has been noticeable by its absence. I can see it. At least I think I can. I think it is there. The ability to think means I must be, but my feet have no sense of reality. My brain is telling them to move and they are moving. I have evidence. The sound of their obedience echoes back up into my skull, or does it?
Faith is a beautiful thing, the greatest gift a person can possess. I look behind me, convinced someone else is making the sound of footsteps, but there is no one there, not unless God is walking behind me wearing size eight trainers. The footsteps belong to me. They are mine. I must have faith. I must own them and try to reconnect with them. I must always try to own the physical vessel within which my mind resides. They are not mutually exclusive. Gary told me that. He also taught me that the power of possession lies within me. I must own all that I am in a sexual, physical, emotional and spiritual sense.
I stand still and the steps fall silent, more evidence I suppose that they were indeed mine, but now the doors and windows are rushing past me, left and right. I’m afraid. I do not have faith. I’m not sure what is actually moving, the doors, the windows, the corridor, or me. I’m not sure what’s real. I’m not sure I’m real, or whether in fact I have ever been real. Am I a delusion? Is the corridor a delusion? Are we a mutual delusion? Perhaps neither of us actually exists in reality.
What is reality? Is it something that resides only in physical matter? Is it something that people, as individual portions of physical matter, create for themselves? I have no physicality therefore I cannot exist.
What is existence? Is it the same as reality? Does anything exist? Maybe this is limbo, this nowhere place, this empty corridor of dubious reality within which I dubiously exist? I’m a question Mark, something unanswered.
Gary’s calm voice pushes its way into my pulsing thoughts. It tells me to take deep slow breaths and to make contact with the physical world and believe. Crouching down I touch obedient fingers to the corridor floor, swirling the surface, willing myself to feel the grainy texture of dusty tiles trodden by feet other than mine. I can’t feel my hand, so how I can feel the floor? Is it my hand touching the floor? It doesn’t look like my hand. I do not recognise it. I do not believe.
Shining drops appear on the floor. What are they? How did I end up here, in this position, static, in the middle of a doubtful corridor? I glance back at the distance covered and then forward at the distance yet to go. I cannot breathe. I cannot move. I have no faith in anything.
More mysterious shining drops appear. My mind tells my eyelids to close and shut them out. I think they have obeyed because it’s dark. Now I’m terrified because I may never be able to open them again. I will be alone for all time in a black nothingness of my own words. Perhaps this is my punishment for what I did to Jase.
‘He ain’t heavy he’s my brother’ the famous Hollies song, which had melded with my brain cells as I came to wakefulness, leaked a little more of its DNA into my cerebral space telling of a long, long road from which there is no return. What it refers to of course is death. Death is the only outcome of life. Perhaps this corridor is my end of the road, my death?
Jase used to say people were fleeting shadows cast upon the corridor of time. It was up to each of us, no matter what cards life had dealt us, to cast as big a shadow as possible while we had the corporeal ability to do so. I cast no shadow. I’m just a series of words. I’m a voice without corporal reality. Perhaps I once was alive, but am no longer, and have to come to an acceptance of that fact, like Pincher Martin. I’m drowning, not in seawater, but in a spin of dreams.
Gary And Corporal Reality
Mark didn’t cry when I caned him. He rarely does. He gave an involuntary hiss of pain, his hands clutching at the bedcovers as the cane left the first livid impression on the lower portion of his bare backside. Thereafter he kept his face pressed against the mattress of the bed he was bending across, making no sound at all.
I don’t like using the cane. It isn’t my instrument of choice, but it serves the purpose Mark needs it to serve more effectively than anything else. As such I apply it with due seriousness and at full flight. I keep the strikes low, preferring to risk hitting his thighs rather than risk injuring his spine or kidney area with a misplaced stroke.
By the time the cane whipped his buttocks for the tenth time his body was covered in an oily sheen of perspiration and his legs were visibly trembling. To my mind he’d had enough, more than enough. Casting aside the stick I made to help him stand. He refused, telling me through gritted teeth to complete the agreed number of strokes. Fifteen.
I voiced my concern, but he grasped at my wrist and his eyes came closer to misting with tears than at any time during the caning. He reminded me that the object of the exercise was to fulfil his need. He pleaded with me to finish the full quota. He repeated the words he had said as he handed me the cane: "I was not - I have been - I am not - I ‘do’ mind. I want to be - I need to feel that I am.” It’s a corruption of an ancient Epicurean epitaph and a code that Mark is in profound need.
I rubbed his back for a few moments, deliberating, and then I picked up the cane and continued in accordance with his wishes. I completed the number of strokes he himself had allotted, administering another five to his welted bottom.
When I helped him stand he reached his arms around my neck pressing his face to mine. I wrapped my arms round his waist. Pulling him tight against me I felt the rapid beat of his heart mirroring the rapid beat of my own. I held him in silence, rubbing my cheek to his soft mousy hair until the pain tremors left his body and the fire in his backside died a little, sufficient at least for him to realise the rest of him was frozen. It was a reaction to pain. I shepherded him beneath the bedclothes and then stripped off and joined him.
I gently stroked his back before brushing my fingers over the hot tender ridges on his bottom. My cock stiffened at the knowledge I had put them there. There is, for good or ill, an inherent sexuality in the wielding of power and penalty. I call it the sensuality of savagery. When it’s consensual between two people it becomes all the more potent, because it is bonded with a deep trust. It takes the exchange from a potentially cruel and one-sided power dynamic to something with emotional and sexual equality at its heart.
Coitus was harsh and urgent, driven by the endorphins released in the giving and receiving of pain. Mark set the tone with a kiss that drew blood. I followed through, giving no quarter. I forced him to yield and submit to penetration in a position that was least comfortable for him, making him beg permission to orgasm. Like the caning it was what he wanted and needed from me. It was an uncompromising act of necessity, which completed the process of re-grounding him in corporal and corporeal reality.
Afterwards I petted and caressed him, running a hand down his spine, bringing it to rest on his bruised flesh. His lovely hazel eyes were now clear and calm. They connected completely with mine. He smiled before leaning towards me, softly flicking his tongue over the cut his biting kiss had left on my lip. It stung, and I flinched. He made no apology knowing none was required. I made sweet, gentle love to him confirming our relationship and his corporeal existence via a different set of emotional receptors.
Later, as he lay sleepily relaxed in my arms, he asked if we still had talking to do with regard to the events of the day. I confirmed it. He asked when. I said I would let him know in due course and he was not to ask me again. What he had desired had been given. It was over and it was for me to now decide what would follow.
He gave a small nod and settled himself closer against me, drifting into a deep sleep, whimpering only when he shifted position and the sheet brushed against his sore bottom. I turned him onto his side, holding him as he slept. The endorphins that had carried him through the caning and its immediate aftermath were fast diminishing. He would be fully au fait with his physical aspect for days to come. Whenever he moved or sat down it would literally bite him in the backside.
In truth the spin of dreams are not dreams at all. They are unbridled thought processes, which he has allowed himself to be caught up in. They induce an extreme panic reaction. He can take a thought, a phrase, an emotion or even a single word and build a complex mind maze out of it. He will go deeper and deeper into it until he’s so disoriented, distressed and mentally exhausted that he dissociates. He enters a state of altered consciousness where he feels divorced from both the external world and his own physical form. It utterly terrifies him, even though he now understands the processes involved and knows it is within his power to control. The moment I saw him in the hospital corridor today I knew he was not in control and was deeply entrenched in such an episode.
I was alerted to his presence in the corridor by one of my colleagues, Sheena. She encountered him as she made her way to the staff canteen for lunch, walking from the psychology outpatients department to the main hospital where the canteen is located. She was going via a broad linking passageway known as Admin Alley because of the rows of now empty offices. It was Sheena who first introduced me to Mark. She consulted me regarding a client she was treating on the wards, whom she felt would benefit from cognitive behaviour therapy upon discharge. The moment I met him I knew I could not take him on as a patient. I felt an instant attraction. I referred him to another of my colleagues. Our paths crossed again some time later.
Mark was oblivious to my presence in the corridor. His dilated eyes punctuated the bleached blank page of his face and told me he was lost in an altogether different corridor to the one he was standing in. I spoke his name and pinched hard at his earlobes, but there was no reaction. He was as unable to connect with my physicality, as with his own at that point in time. It was the worst episode he’d engaged in for a long time. I suspected Jase was involved somewhere. Only Jase still has the power to send him so far into himself.
I begged Sheena to get me some ice cubes from the canteen. While she was gone I repeatedly told him to take deep, slow breaths hoping my voice would register somewhere in his consciousness and help bring him out of the trance he was marooned in.
Taking his hands I gently manoeuvred him down into a crouching position brushing his fingers over the dusty floor encouraging him to believe it was there, solid and real, just as he was solid and real and not part of some dream or delusion.
Sheena returned with a paper cup filled with ice cubes. I placed one in the palm of his left hand curling his fingers over it and holding them. I hoped the coldness would register in his brain and help shock him back into time and place. Icy drops splashed onto the corridor tiles, shining in the sunlight streaming through the avenue of windows, but he showed no evidence of sensory awareness. Then he shut off another connective sense by closing his eyes and curling forward with his hands pressed to his face. I pulled them away and placed cubes into both his palms, closing his fingers tight over them until the ice passed from solid matter and returned to liquid. When the ice melted I repeated the action, feeling the painful cold strike through his flesh into mine. He at last reacted, giving a gasp of shock and opening his eyes as the cold registered. The barrier had been breached.
He clung to me. I did my best to reassure and comfort him as he stated the all too obvious. He felt unwell and had been on his way to tell me.
As I suspected Jase was the prompt for the episode. Jase, or Jason, was Mark’s brother. He had also been his best friend. He was the younger by almost two years, but in terms of worldly wisdom was older than Mark will ever be. Jase supported his brother through the episodic mood swings and bouts of severe depression that their mother could not empathise with. She failed to understand why someone who was physically whole could succumb to mental despair. She died when Mark was eighteen and Jason sixteen. It was left to the brothers to care for each other, which they did.
Jase’s reaction to Mark’s confession that he was gay had been to slip his arms around his neck and make a joke confession of his own. He was disabled, but he suspected Mark might already have guessed. The wheelchair was a dead giveaway. He made Mark promise to try and live his life to its fullest with what nature had blessed/cursed him with, just as he would strive to live his.
Jason had a capacity for enjoyment and a real verve for life, and the ladies. He entertained his brother with details of his love life and its complexities of achieving. Jase had been by all accounts a massive wit and intellect held prisoner within a crippled body. Mark, a naturally shy boy with hesitant social skills, made worse by his own problems, had worshipped him.
Then tragedy struck. Jase, just short of twenty-two years of age, went to sleep one night never to awaken again. It seems his heart defect had been overlooked in the face of his more obvious physical problems. Mark found him dead and his world fell apart. Without his brother, all motivation for keeping some kind of control of his own difficulties was gone.
Mark is not allowed to visit the grave. This was a rule we established early in our relationship. It is immovable, which sounds harsh, but isn’t. Jase’s grave is not a focus for loving remembrance. It does not give solace. It is a source of stress and torment for Mark. Visits to it inevitably lead to depression, consuming guilt and consequently episodes such as he experienced today. Mark has never been able to forgive himself for going against his brother’s wishes and consigning his body to the earth with Christian ritual.
Even after talking the episode through, Mark was still fretful, his eyes registering anxiety about his ‘realness.’ I had to rearrange my afternoon appointments to bring him home. The moment we arrived he got the heaviest cane and asked I do what was necessary for him to clear his head and feel in complete possession of himself again. I did so, because I am committed to him.
You do not commit lightly to people like Mark. You do not sign up only for their glittering attributes, because like a diamond mine the sparkling gems are seamed between darker layers. It takes time and great care to bring them forth. You don’t tell people like him that you love them, and then withdraw the moment you encounter a difficult seam. You accept them in their entirety or you leave them alone.
I’ll never leave Mark alone. I couldn’t. I knew it the moment he said hello and smiled at me in the self same corridor he had been in today. I was going to lunch in the canteen and he was heading for the outpatient department. We recognised each other from our previous brief meeting. We got talking and that was it, the beginning of our relationship. All relationships begin with a few words.
We work well together. I have learned his needs, and quirks, as he has mine. He can paint the living room in garish colours in the dead of night on manic impulse and I will deal with it. I will enjoy his bright moments and share his sad silences. I’ll weather his frustrations and rage, because they are all part of the man I love in his entirety.
Now his personal need has been served, what remains to be served is a need that lies at the heart of our relationship as a couple. We have rules. He has broken those rules. He knows that at an appropriate time, when he has healed, we will be discussing the matter.
By his own admission Mark was aware as soon as he woke up that he was moving into a state of altered consciousness. The process had begun in sleep. He had vague recollections of a dream about Jase. The emotive song on the radio then compounded it as he came to wakefulness. That was the point at which he needed to take control of the situation and confront it instead of feeding into it. It was also the point he should have involved me, so I could help him employ the cognitive techniques needed to halt the process of dissociation.
He had recognised the triggers, the dream and the song. He recognised the effect it was having on him. It made him long for Jase and reawakened his pain and sadness at losing him. For Mark those natural emotions are tainted by misplaced guilt, and not only because he went against Jase’s wishes for cremation. He feels terrible guilt because he has always found life a struggle. He feels he allowed his mind and emotions to cripple him more than Jase ever allowed his body to cripple his vivacious life force.
He claims he just found himself in the cemetery today, as if he’d been transported there by magic. Of course he and I know this is nonsense. He made the choice to go. He drove there in his car.
As I said, our relationship has rules, and he had seriously breached them. He deliberately withheld knowledge of a negative and emotionally harmful thought pattern and consequently visited forbidden territory with predictable results.
The breaking of rules must necessarily bring consequences - otherwise the rules have no value to begin with.
I will punish Mark for his actions today and he, who has taken fifteen strokes from a heavy rattan cane without shedding a tear or making a sound, will wail and cry when I put him over my knee and discipline him using no more than my hand to spank him. There will be no sex afterwards. Discipline is discipline. It’s a different kind of necessity and a different kind of trade-off to the caning. Instead I will comfort him and reassure him as to his worth and my love for him and then I’ll send him to bed, alone.
The End
copyright Fabian Black 2024
fabianblackromance@gmail.com