After taking a long shower and brushing her damp hair, she put on a sapphire-blue silk robe and went to the retreat adjacent to the master bedroom.
In the center of this small room stood a custom-designed black leather recliner. To the left of the recliner was a computer on a wheeled stand.
From a closet, Susan removed VR — virtual reality gear of her own design: a lightweight ventilated helmet with hinged goggles and a pair of supple elbow-length gloves, both wired to a nerve-impulse processor.
The motorized recliner was currently configured as an armchair. She sat and engaged a harness, much like that in an automobile: one strap fitting securely across her abdomen, another running diagonally from her left shoulder to her right hip.
Temporarily, she held the VR equipment in her lap. Her feet rested on a series of upholstered rollers that attached to the base of the chair, positioned similarly to the footplate on a beautician's chair. This was the walking pad, which would allow her to simulate walking when the VR scenario required it.
She switched on the computer and loaded a program labeled Therapy, which she herself had created.
This was not a game. It was not an industrial training program or an educational tool, either. It was precisely what it claimed to be. Therapy. And it was better than anything that any disciple of Freud could have done for her.
She had devised a revolutionary new use for VR technology, and one day she might even patent and market the application. For the lime being, however, Therapy was for her use only.
First she plugged the VR gear into a jack on an interfacing device already connected to the computer, and then she put on the helmet. The goggles were flipped up, away from her eyes.
She pulled on the gloves and flexed her fingers.
The computer screen offered several options. Using the mouse, she clicked on Begin.
Turning away from the computer, leaning back in the recliner, Susan flipped down the goggles, which fit snugly to her eye sockets. The lenses were in fact a pair of miniature, matched, high-definition video displays.
She is surrounded by a soothing blue light that gradually grows darker until all is black.
To match the unfolding scenario in the VR world, the motorized recliner hummed and reconfigured into a bed, parallel to the floor.
Susan was now lying on her back. Her arms were crossed on her chest, and her hands were fisted.
In the blackness, one point of light appears: a soft yellow and blue glow. On the far side of the room. Lower than the bed, near the floor. It resolves into a Donald Duck night light plugged in a wall outlet.
In the retreat adjacent to her bedroom, strapped to the recliner and encumbered with the VR gear, Susan appeared oblivious to the real world. She murmured as though she were a sleeping child. But this was a sleep filled with tension and threatening shadows.
A door opens.
From the upstairs hallway, a wedge of light pries into the bedroom, waking her. With a gasp, she sits up in bed, and the covers fall away from her, as a cool draft ruffles her hair.
She looks down at her arms, at her small hands, and she is six years old, wearing her favorite Pooh Bear pajamas. They are flannel-soft against her skin.
On one level of consciousness, Susan knows that this is merely a realistically animated scenario that she has created actually re-created from memory and with which she can interact in three dimensions through the magic of virtual reality. On another level, however, it seems real to her, and she is able to lose herself in the unfolding drama.
Backlighted in the doorway is a tall man with broad shoulders.
Susan's heart races. Her mouth is dry.
Rubbing her sleep-matted eyes, she feigns illness: 'I don't feel so good.'
Without a word, he closes the door and crosses the room in the darkness.
As he approaches, young Susan begins to tremble. He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress sags, and the springs creak under him. He is a big man.
His cologne smells of lime and spices.
He is breathing slowly, deeply, as though relishing the little-girl smell of her, the sleepy-middle-of the-night smell of her.
'I have the flu,' she says in a pathetic attempt to turn him away.
He switches on the bedside lamp.
'Real bad flu,' she says.
He is only forty years old but graying at the temples. His eyes are gray too, clear gray and so cold that when she meets his gaze, her trembling becomes a terrible shudder.
'My tummy aches,' she lies.
Putting one hand to Susan's head, ignoring her pleas of illness, he smoothes her sleep-rumpled hair.
'I don't want to do this,' she says.
She spoke those words not merely in the virtual world but in the real one. Her voice was small, fragile, although not that of a child.
When she had been a girl, she'd been unable to say no.
Not ever.
Not once.
Fear of resisting had gradually become a habit of submitting.
But this was a chance to undo the past. This was therapy, a program of virtual experience, which she had designed for herself and which had proved to be remarkably effective.
'Daddy, I don't want to do this,' she says.
'You'll like it.'
'But I don 't like It 'in time you will.' 'I won't. I never will.' 'You'll be surprised.' 'Please don 't.'
'This is what I want,' he insists.
'Please don't.'
They are alone in the house at night. The day staff is off duty at this hour, and after dinner the live-in couple keep to their apartment over the pool house unless summoned to the main residence.
Susan's mother has been dead more than a year.
She misses her mother so much.
Now, in this motherless world, Susan's father strokes her hair and says, 'This is what I want.'
'I'll tell,' she says, trying to shrink away from him.
'If you try to tell, I'll have to make sure no one can ever hear you, ever again. Do you understand, Sweetheart? I'll have to kill you,' he says not in a menacing way but in a voice still soft and hoarse with perverse desire.
Susan is convinced of his sincerity by the quietness with which he makes the threat and by the apparently genuine sadness in his eyes at the prospect of having to murder her.
'Don't make me do it, Sugarpie. Don't make me kill you like I killed your mother.'
Susan's mother died suddenly from some sickness; young Susan doesn't know the exact cause, although she has heard the word 'infection.'
Now her father says, 'Slipped a sedative in her after-dinner drink so she wouldn't feel the needle later. Then in the night, when she was sleeping, I injected the bacteria. You understand me, honey? Germs. A needle full of germs. Put the germs, the sickness, deep inside her with a needle. Virulent infection of the myocardium, hit her hard and fast. Twenty-four hours of misdiagnosis gave it time to do a lot of damage.'
She is too young to understand many of the terms he uses, but she is clear about the essence of his claim and senses that he speaks the truth.
Her father knows about needles. He is a doctor.
'Should I go get a needle, Sugarpie?'
She is too afraid to speak.
Needles scare her.
He knows that needles scare her.
He knows.
He knows how to use needles, and he knows how to use fear.
